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 1889, Sibyl Sanderson in Esclarmonde, a dinner on the platform of the Tour Eiffel, a breakfast at the Pavillon Henri IV at St. Germain. Again, she considered her pink and gold salon in Paris, with its countless, miniature, beflowered, white porcelain figures of Saxe and Sèvres, mounted on gold or enamelled bases. For this room Bouguereau had painted one of his prettiest, most waxy Italian peasants, and on another wall hung her own portrait by Carolus-Duran, in which she was represented wearing a gown with successive flounces of yellow lace, a full-blown, red rose in her belt, standing before a background of marble terraces and clipped limes. But always at the root of her mind stirred the thought of Tony, and always, despite her protracted effort to drive it away, this memory rose to inspire the tears in her eyes.

She had encountered Tony, a blond French boy of surpassing handsomeness and twenty-two years, ten months ago in the Quinconces at Bordeaux. From the very beginning she had been vaguely aware that he was stupid, what the French call bête, that he dressed like a cabot, and that he had the habits and manners of a maquereau. Nevertheless, from the moment that she first saw him she felt that she belonged to him completely. His name was Antoine Dupuy and he was a tenor in a travelling operetta troupe. She remembered him with especial delight as Frederic, Prince of Pisa, in La Mascotte, a rele in which she had seen him the night before their