THE DREAM CIRCEAN
reeling against the houses, crying with laughter, too weak
with laughter to stand straight.
“ By-and-by they took pity, came forward, and released
me from my unpleasant situation.
“ But the shame of me, as I slunk away down the streets|
I would not go home that night at all, ashamed to face my
own servants.
“T told myself, in the end, that this was a rare accident;
but for all that there must have remained a slight stain
upon the mirror of perfect chivalry. In the old days when
they taught logic in the schools one learnt how delicate a
flower was a ‘universal affirmative.’
“It was some uneventful months after this ‘ tragedy of the
ideal’ that Iwas again walking home very late. I had been
to the Jardin des Plantes in the afternoon, and, dining in that
quarter, had stayed lingering on the bridge watching the
Seine. The moon dropped down behind the houses—with a
start I realised that I must gohome. There was some danger,
you understand, of footpads. Nothing, however, occurred
until—I always preferred to walk through the narrow streets ;
there is romance in narrow streets !—I found myself in the
Rue des Quatre Vents ; not a stone’s-throw from this house,
as you know.
“T had been thinking of my previous misadventure, and,
with the folly of youth, had been indulging in a reverie of the
kind that begins ‘If only.’ If only she had been a princess
ravished by a wicked ogre. Ifonly... Ifonly...
“On the south side of the Rue des Quatre Vents is a
house standing well back from the street, with a railing in
front of it—a common type, is it not? But what riveted my
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