“Oh!” cried Miss Thompkins.  “You can see it from here.  It’s funny how unreal it seems, isn’t it?”

She pointed at one of the large white-curtained windows of the restaurant, through which was visible a round column covered with advertisements of theatres, music-halls, and concert-halls, printed in many colours and announcing superlative delights.  Names famous wherever pleasure is understood gave to their variegated posters a pleasant air of distinguished familiarity—­names of theatres such as “Varietes,” “Vaudeville,” “Chatelet,” “Theatre Francais,” “Folies-Bergere,” and names of persons such as “Sarah Bernhardt,” “Huegenet,” “Le Bargy,” “Litvinne,” “Lavalliere.”  But the name in the largest type—­dark crimson letters on rose paper—­the name dominating all the rest, was the name of Musa.  The ingenuous stranger to Paris was compelled to think that as an artist Musa was far more important than anybody else.  Along the length of all the principal boulevards, and in many of the lesser streets, the ingenuous stranger encountered, at regular distances of a couple of hundred yards or so, one of these columns planted on the kerb; and all the scores of them bore exactly the same legend; they all spoke of nothing but blissful diversions, and they all put Musa ahead of anybody else in the world of the stage and the platform.  Sarah Bernhardt herself, dark blue upon pale, was a trifle compared to Musa on the columns.  And it had been so for days.  Other posters were changed daily—­changed by mysterious hands before even bread-girls were afoot with their yards of bread—­but the space given to Musa repeated always the same tidings, namely that Musa ("the great violinist”) was to give an orchestral concert at the Salle Xavier, assisted by the Xavier orchestra, on Thursday, September 24, at 9 P.M.  Particulars of the programme followed.

Paris was being familiarised with Musa.  His four letters looked down upon the fever of the thoroughfares; they were perused by tens of thousands of sitters in cafes and in front of cafes; they caught the eye of men and women fleeing from the wrath to come in taxicabs; they competed successfully with newspaper placards; and on that Thursday—­for the Thursday in question had already run more than half its course—­they had so entered into the sub-conscious brain of Paris that no habitue of the streets, whatever his ignorant indifference to the art of music, could have failed to reply with knowledge, on hearing Musa mentioned, “Oh, yes!” implying that he was fully acquainted with the existence of the said Musa.

Tommy was right:  there did seem to be a certain unreality about the thing, yet it was utterly real.