Page:The Yellow Book - 04.djvu/114

98 the oleander tubs that surrounded with much decorative ability the doors of the Café Amadou, he agreed to come to my rooms and have a cup of coffee, in order to narrate the exciting and mysterious incident of the day before.

Sitting on each side of my stove, which was red-hot and threatening to crack at any minute, Wladislaw, with cautions to me "not to judge too soon: I should see if it had not been strange, this that had happened to him," told me this ridiculous story. He had started up the Bois; he had found the Pare Monceau; he had come down a big street to the Madeleine; he had looked in; it had reminded him of a concert-hall, and was not at all impressive (gar nlcht imponirend); he had walked along the left-hand side of the Boulevard des Capucines. It was as poor a street as he could have imagined in a big town, the shops wretched; he supposed in London our shops were better? I assured him that in London the shops were much better; that it was a standing mystery to me, as to all the other English women I knew, where the pretty things for which Paris is celebrated were to be bought. And I implored him to tell me his adventure.

Ah! Well—now the point was reached; now I was to hear! One minute!—Well, he had come opposite the Café de la Paix, and he had paused an instant to contemplate the unrelieved commonplace ugliness of the average Frenchman as there to be observed—and then he had pursued his way.

It was getting dusk in the winter afternoon, and when he came through the Place de l'Opera all the lights were lit, and he was delighted, as who must not be, by the effect of that particular bit of Paris? He was just crossing the Place to go down the left-hand side of the Avenue, when it occurred to him that he was being followed.