Page:Keeping the Peace.pdf/249

 forwarded under separate cover—and an advance payment of two hundred dollars.

Within a few seconds after receiving and reading this letter he had made the mistake of telling Anne all about it. Two hundred dollars—a thousand francs—and two hundred more to follow when the finished illustrations had been received, was a lot of money in the Paris of those days. And Anne, who a moment before had been prepared and willing to work her hands to the bone for Edward, had sudden visions of a life of ease and plenty and of endless jollifications. The money made her feel rather important, and for the first breakfast of their life together she gave Edward chocolate which was burnt. But she sat on his knee while he drank it and so he never knew.

And indeed for some weeks he labored under the impression that everything in this world is just about right, and that nothing is ever burnt or spoiled. The stern moralist will perhaps regret that these weeks should have been the happiest that Edward had ever lived or that he was ever going to live. But the stern moralist is seldom a Parisian, or a supporter of the theory that God and nature may have put the sex impulse into man for precisely the same reason that they put it into flowers, molluscs, mastodons, ants, wasps and bees—namely, that occasionally it should be obeyed.