Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/44

 pas to the latest hero of the Beaux—Arts, or bully from the School of Medicine, even though the hero were the son of a village apothecary, and the bully reeked to heaven of absinthe and tobacco; while the Prime Minister of England would find his name, it is more than to be feared, unknown, and himself regarded as a person of quite extraordinary unimportance.

So we accepted Prince Theodore Pavelovitch, and tried him by his individual merits, For all the world as if he were made of the same flesh and blood as Tom, Dick, and Harry; and thee-and—thou'd him, and hailed him as mon vieux, as merrily as we did everybody else. Indeed, I shouldn‘t wonder if the majority of those who knew him were serenely unaware that his origin was royal (he would have been the last to apprise them of it), and roughly classed him with our other princes valaques. For convenience sake, we lumped them all—the divers natives of the lands between the Black Sea and the Adriatic—under the generic name, Valaques; we couldn’t be bothered with nicer ethnological distinctions.

We tried Prince Theodore by his individual merits; but, as his individual merits happened to be signal, we liked him very much. He hadn’t a trace of "side;" his pockets were full of money; he was exceedingly free-handed. No man was readier for a lark, none more inventive or untiring in the prosecution of one. He was a brilliant scholar, besides, and almost the best fencer in the Quarter. And he was pleasantly good-looking—fair-haired, blue-eyed, with a friendly humorous face, a pointed beard, and a slight, agile, graceful figure. Everybody liked him, and everybody was sorry when he had to leave us, and return to his ultra-mundane birthplace. "It can’t be helped," he said. "I must go home and do three years of military service. But then I shall come back. I mean always to live in Paris."

That