fancied I had caught a fish. It was most exciting."

Hugh again impersonated a Chinese mandarin.

"You see, he allowed so few people to know him, he moved with such
difficulty in that formally laid-out small, professional world, with its
endless leaving of cards and showing yourself on the proper days. I
think they considered him a sort of Huron afflicted with genius, and
forgave him. He ran away from them, he fought them off. And to feel that
there was a magic spiderweb between this creature and me, new every day
and invisible to everybody else and dripping with poetry like dewdrops!
Can't you fancy the intoxication? I was nineteen.... I had engaged
myself to be married to Beverly Shirley. I had known him all my
life--before I left home--but I had absolutely no conviction of
disloyalty. This was different; this was another life."

"Another you," agreed Hugh, as one who took exotic states of mind for
granted.

"Well, yes.... It was one of the awful at-homes of Madame Normand's. She
took American girls _en pension_, and she was supposed to look after us
severely; but as she was an American herself, of course she gave us a
great deal of liberty. She was the wife of a _professeur_, and she had
rather an imposing _salon_, so she received just so often, and you had
to go or she never stopped asking you why. You have been to those French
receptions?"

"Where they serve music and syrup and little hard cakes, and you carry
away the impression of a lordly function because of the scenery and the
manners? Indeed yes!"