I turned rather hastily, while my hands were yet clammy with the skull, thinking that this accusation of Philistinism was aimed at me.  But Hohenfels thought of nothing less than of a personality, being in his cloudiest mood of generalization.  So I only concealed the handkerchief, while I said, as easily as I might, “You need not accuse your German blood, for I have lived long enough in my American’s Paradise to know that civilized Paris is considerably worse in this particular respect, with the addition of a certain goblin levity particularly French.  How often have I seen babies frightened by the skulls in the dentists’ windows, with their cynical chewing action!  It is said that a child sat next a dentist’s apprentice once in an omnibus, and was observed to turn rigid, fixed and white, but unable to speak:  he had sat on one of these skulls, and it had bitten him.  Silver-mounted skulls set as goblets, in imitation of Byron, are to be seen at any of the china-shops rubbing against the chaste cheeks of the old maid’s teacup.  Skeletons are sold, bleached and with gilded hinges, to the medical students, who buy the pale horrors as openly as meerschaum pipes.  Have I not often found young Grandstone supping among his doctors’ apprentices of the Ober restaurant after theatre-hours, a skeleton in the corner filled with umbrellas like a hall-rack, and crowned with the triple or quintuple tiara of the girls’ best bonnets?  Ay, Mimi Pinson’s cap has known what it is to perch on the bony head of Death.  The juxtaposition is but an emblem.  The sewing-girl, like Hood’s shirtmaker, scarcely fears the ‘phantom of grisly bone.’  Poor Francine! where have you taken your artisanne’s cap to, I wonder?  Are you left alone, all alone again, and thinking of the pretty solitude you have left behind you at Carlsruhe?  Who uses those polished keys now?”

Hohenfels interrupted me, complaining that my monologue was uninteresting and diffuse, and was interfering with the railway time-table.  But I finished it in the car:  “And the railway!  What has a person of fixed and independent habits to do with railways but to growl at them?  Before I was tempted upon the railway by that impertinent engineer at Noisy, I got up and sat down when I liked, ate wholesome food at my own hours, and was contented at home.  Confusion to him who made me the victim of his engineering calculations!  Confusion to Grandstone and his nest of serpents at Epernay!  Did they not introduce me to Fortnoye, who has doubly destroyed my peace?  Where are the conspirators, that I may pulverize them with my maledictions?”

[Illustration:  Brussels.]

This question—­which Hohenfels called peevish as he buried himself in his book—­was not answered until we had passed Verviers, Chaudfontaine and Liege.  I was aroused from a sulky slumber in the station at Brussels by Hohenfels, who said, in his musical scolding way, like the busy wheeze of a clicking music-box, “You may say what you like, with your left-handed flatteries, in regard to Fortnoye, and you may praise Ariadnes and widows to the end of the chapter.  You are sorry at this moment not to be at Epernay to see the destroyer of your peace married:  you had rather assist at the making of a wife than at the making of a widow.”