The Equinox (Volume I, Number II)

THE DREAM CIRCEAN suppleness of youth; and together they ran rapidly down to the boulevard, where, hailing a fiacre, they jumped in and clattered down towards the Seine. Roderic sat well back in the carriage, a little lost in thought. But the old man sat upright, and peered eagerly about him. Once he stopped the cab suddenly at a house with a low railing in front of it, well set back from the street, jumped out, examined it minutely, and then, with a sigh and a shake of the head, came back, a little wearier, a little older. They crossed the Seine, rattled up the Rue Bonaparte, and stopped at the door of Roderic’s studio. II LA RUE DES QUATRE VENTS “ Ah, well,” said the old man, as he concluded his examina- tion of the pictures, “what I seek is not here. If it will not weary you, I will tell you a story. Perhaps, although you have not painted it, you have seen it. Perhaps—bah! I am seventy years of age, and a fool to the end. “Listen, my young friend! I was not always seventy years of age, and that of which I have to tell you happened when I was twenty-two. “In those days I was very rich, and very happy. I had never loved; I cared for nobody. My parents were both dead long since. A year of freedom from the control of my good old guardian, the Duc de Castelnaudary (God rest his soul !), had left me yet taintless as a flower. I had that chivalrous devotion to woman which perhaps never really existed at any time save for rare individuals. I H 113