The weather was even more superb than on the previous day.  Paris glittered around her as she drove, slowly, in a horse-taxi, to the Place de l’Opera on the right bank, where the grand boulevard meets the Avenue de l’Opera and the Rue de la Paix.  Here was the very centre of the fashionable and pleasure-ridden district which the Quarter held in noble scorn.  She had seen it before, because she had started a banking account (under advice from Mr. Foulger), and the establishment of her bankers was situate at the corner of the Avenue de l’Opera and the Rue de la Paix.  But she knew little of the district, and such trifling information as she had acquired was tinged by the natural hostility of a young woman who for over six months, with no compulsion to do so, had toiled regularly and fiercely in the pursuit of knowledge.  She paid off the cab, and went to test the soundness of her bankers.  The place was full of tourists, and in one department of it young men in cages, who knew not the Quarter, were counting, and ladling, and pinning together, and engorging, and dealing forth, the currency and notes of all the great nations of the earth.  The spectacle was inspiring.

In half a year the restive but finally obedient Mr. Foulger had sent three thousand pounds to Paris in the unpoetic form of small oblong pieces of paper signed with his own dull signature.  Audrey desired to experience the thrill of authentic money.  She waited some time in front of a cage, with her cheque-book open on the counter, until a young man glanced at her interrogatively through the bars.

“How much money have I got here, please?” she asked.  She ought to have said:  “What is my balance, please?” But nobody had taught her the sacred formula.

“What name?” said the clerk.

“Moze—­Audrey Moze,” she answered, for she had not dared to acquaint Mr. Foulger with her widowhood, and his cheques were made out to herself.

The clerk vanished, and in a moment reappeared, silently wrote something on a little form, and pushed it to her under the grille.  She read: 

“73,065 frs. 50c.”

The fact was that in six months she had spent little more than the amount which she had brought with her from London.  Having begun in simplicity, in simplicity she had continued, partly because she had been too industrious and too earnest for luxurious caprices, partly because she had never been accustomed to anything else but simplicity, and partly from wilfulness.  It had pleased her to think that she was piling tens of thousands upon tens of thousands—­in francs.

But in the night she had decided that the moment had arrived for a change in the great campaign of seeing life and tasting it.

She timorously drew a cheque for eleven thousand francs, and asked for ten thousand in notes and a thousand in gold.  The clerk showed no trace of either astonishment or alarm; but he insisted on her endorsing the cheque.  When she saw the gold, she changed half of it for ten notes of fifty francs each.