Now Sophy Gold had never been kissed in just that way before.  You would have thought she would not know what to do; but the plainest woman, as well as the loveliest, has the centuries back of her.  Sophy’s mother, and her mother’s mother, and her mother’s mother’s mother had been kissed before her.  So they told her to say: 

“You shouldn’t have done that.”

And the answer, too, was backed by the centuries: 

“I know it; but I couldn’t help it.  Don’t be angry!”

“You know,” said Sophy with a little tremulous laugh, “I’m very, very ugly—­when it isn’t moonlight.”

“Paris,” spake Max Tack, diplomat, “is so full of medium-lookers who think they’re pretty, and of pretty ones who think they’re beauties, that it sort of rests my jaw and mind to be with some one who hasn’t any fake notions to feed.  They’re all right; but give me a woman with brains every time.”  Which was a lie!

They drove home down the Bois—­the cool, spacious, tree-bordered Bois—­and through the Champs Elysees.  Because he was an artist in his way, and because every passing fiacre revealed the same picture, Max Tack sat very near her and looked very tender and held her hand in his.  It would have raised a laugh at Broadway and Forty-second.  It was quite, quite sane and very comforting in Paris.

At the door of the hotel: 

“I’m sailing Wednesday,” said Max Tack.  “You—­you won’t forget me?”

“Oh, no—­no!”

“You’ll call me up or run into the office when you get to New York?”

“Oh, yes!”

He walked with her to the lift, said good-bye and returned to the fiacre with the tinkling bell.  There was a stunned sort of look in his face.  The fiacre meter registered two francs seventy.  Max Tack did a lightning mental calculation.  The expression on his face deepened.  He looked up at the cabby—­the red-faced, bottle-nosed cabby, with his absurd scarlet vest, his mustard-coloured trousers and his glazed top hat.

“Well, can you beat that?  Three francs thirty for the evening’s entertainment!  Why—­why, all she wanted was just a little love!”

To the bottle-nosed one all conversation in a foreign language meant dissatisfaction with the meter.  He tapped that glass-covered contrivance impatiently with his whip.  A flood of French bubbled at his lips.

“It’s all right, boy!  It’s all right!  You don’t get me!” And Max Tacked pressed a five-franc piece into the outstretched palm.  Then to the hotel porter:  “Just grab a taxi for me, will you?  These tubs make me nervous.”

Sophy, on her way to her room, hesitated, turned, then ran up the stairs to the next floor and knocked gently at Miss Morrissey’s door.  A moment later that lady’s kimonoed figure loomed large in the doorway.

“Who is—­oh, it’s you!  Well, I was just going to have them drag the Seine for you.  Come in!”

She went back to the table.  Sheets of paper, rough sketches of hat models done from memory, notes and letters lay scattered all about.  Sophy leaned against the door dreamily.