“Of course I was in his classes.  You know he had an extraordinary success; he struck twelve at once, as they say there.  The French really discovered him as a poet, just as Mallarme discovered Poe; some of them used that parallel.  And the girls—­he was a matinee idol and a cult—­even the French girls.  We went into that classroom thrilling as we never went to any ball.  I worked that winter for him harder than I had ever worked in my life, and about Easter he began to single me out for the most merciless fault-finding.  That was his way of showing that he considered you worth while.  He had a habit of standing over you in class, holding your paper like a knout.  And once or twice—­I called myself a conceited little idiot—­but once or twice—­”

Hugh nodded.  His pulses were singing like morning stars at the spectacle of a new world.

“He used to say of a certain excited, happy feeling, a sort of fey feeling, that you seemed to have swallowed a heavenly pigeon.  And—­well, he looked like that.  But I knocked my vanity on the head and told it, ‘Down to the other dogs.’  I was used to young men; I knew how little such manifestations could mean.  But after that I used to set little lines in the things I wrote for him, very delicately, and sometimes I 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!”

“I slid away after a while, out upon the iron balcony, filled with new lilacs, that overhung the garden.  Something had hurt my little feelings; a letter hadn’t come, perhaps.  I remember how dark and warm the night was, like a gulf under me, and the stars and the lights of Paris seemed very much alike and rather disappointing.  Then I heard his voice behind me, and I was as overwhelmed as—­as Daphne or Danae or one of those pagan ladies might have been when the god came.