“Je veux bien, monsieur.”

Poor Marie!  Marshall and I were absorbed in each other and art.  It was always so.  We dined in a gargotte, and afterwards we went to a students’ hall; and it seems like yesterday.  I can see the moon sailing through a clear sky, and on the pavement’s edge Marshall’s beautiful, slim, manly figure, and Marie’s exquisite gracefulness.  She was Lefevre’s Chloe; so every one sees her now.  Her end was a tragic one.  She invited her friends to dinner, and with the few pence that remained she bought some boxes of matches, boiled them, and drank the water.  No one knew why; some said it was love.

I went to London in an exuberant necktie, a tiny hat; I wore large trousers and a Capoul beard; and I looked, I believe, as unlike an Englishman as a drawing by Grevin.  In the smoking-room of Morley’s Hotel I met my agent, an immense nose, and a wisp of hair drawn over a bald skull.  He explained, after some hesitation, that I owed him a few thousands, and that the accounts were in his portmanteau.  I suggested taking them to a solicitor to have them examined.  The solicitor advised me strongly to contest them.  I did not take the advice, but raised some money instead, and so the matter ended so far as the immediate future was concerned.  The years the most impressionable, from twenty to thirty, when the senses and the mind are the widest awake, I, the most impressionable of human beings, had spent in France, not among English residents, but among that which is the quintessence of the nation; I, not an indifferent spectator, but an enthusiast, striving heart and soul to identify himself with his environment, to shake himself free from race and language and to recreate himself as it were in the womb of a new nationality, assuming its ideals, its morals, and its modes of thought, and I had succeeded strangely well, and when I returned home England was a new country to me; I had, as it were, forgotten everything.  Every aspect of street and suburban garden was new to me; of the manner of life of Londoners I knew nothing.  This sounds incredible, but it is so; I saw, but I could realise nothing.  I went into a drawing-room, but everything seemed far away—­a dream, a presentment, nothing more; I was in touch with nothing; of the thoughts and feelings of those I met I could understand nothing, nor could I sympathise with them:  an Englishman was at that time as much out of my mental reach as an Esquimaux would be now.  Women were nearer to me than men, and I will take this opportunity to note my observation, for I am not aware that any one else has observed that the difference between the two races is found in the men, not in the women.  French and English women are psychologically very similar; the standpoint from which they, see life is the same, the same thoughts interest and amuse them; but the attitude of a Frenchman’s mind is absolutely opposed to that of an Englishman; they stand on either side of a vast abyss, two animals different in colour,