But to-day Jaune d’Antimoine was not blue, for of a sudden he had come to be stayed by a lofty purpose and upheld by a high resolve:  and his purpose and resolve were that within one month’s time he would gain for himself a new suit of clothes!  There were several excellent reasons which together served to fortify him in his exalted resolution.  The most careless observer could not fail to perceive that the clothes which he wore—­and which were incomparably superior to certain others which he possessed, but did not wear—­were sadly shabby; and Vandyke Brown had asked him to be best man at his wedding; and further—­and this was the strongest reason of all—­Jaune d’Antimoine longed, from the very depths of his soul, to make himself pleasing in the eyes of Rose Carthame.

How she managed it none but herself knew; but this charming young person, although the daughter of a widowly exile of France who made an uncertain living by letting lodgings in the region between south and west of Washington Square, always managed to dress herself delightfully.  It is true that feminine analysis might reveal the fact that the materials of which her gowns were made were of the cheapest product of the loom; yet was feminine envy aroused—­yea, even in the dignified portion of Fifth Avenue that lies not south but north of Washington Square—­by the undeniable style of these same gowns, and by their charming accord with the stylish gait and air of the trig little body who wore them.  Therefore it was that when Monsieur Jaune graciously was permitted to accompany Mademoiselle Rose in her jaunts into the grand quarter of the town, the propriety of her garments and the impropriety of his own brought a sense of desolation upon his spirit and a great heaviness upon his loyal heart.

For Jaune loved Rose absolutely to distraction.  To say that he would have laid his coat in the mud for her to walk over does not—­the condition of the coat being remembered—­imply a very superior sort of devotion.  He would have done more than this; he would have laid himself in the mud, and most gladly, that he might have preserved from contamination her single pair of nice shoes.  Even a cool and unprejudiced person, being permitted to see these shoes—­and he certainly would have been, for Rose made anything but a mystery of them—­would have declared that such gallant sacrifice was well bestowed.

The ardor of Jaune’s passion was increased—­as has been common in love matters ever since the world began—­by the knowledge that he had a rival; and this rival was a most dangerous rival, being none other than Madame Carthame’s second-story-front lodger, the Count Siccatif de Courtray.  Simply to be the second-story-front lodger carries with it a most notable distinction in a lodging-house; but to be that and a count too was a combination of splendors that placed Jaune’s rival on a social pinnacle and kept him there.  Not that counts are rare in the region between west and south of Washington Square; on the contrary, they are rather astonishingly plentiful.  But the sort of count who is very rare indeed there is the count who pays his way as he goes along.  Now, in the matter of payments, at least so far as Madame Carthame was concerned, the Count Siccatif de Courtray was exemplary.