I was neither a cynic nor a satirist, but even if I had been, I might have been disarmed by Pickering’s assurance, before we parted, that Madame Blumenthal wished to know me and expected him to introduce me.  Among the foolish things which, according to his own account, he had uttered, were some generous words in my praise, to which she had civilly replied.  I confess I was curious to see her, but I begged that the introduction should not be immediate, for I wished to let Pickering work out his destiny alone.  For some days I saw little of him, though we met at the Kursaal and strolled occasionally in the park.  I watched, in spite of my desire to let him alone, for the signs and portents of the world’s action upon him—­of that portion of the world, in especial, of which Madame Blumenthal had constituted herself the agent.  He seemed very happy, and gave me in a dozen ways an impression of increased self-confidence and maturity.  His mind was admirably active, and always, after a quarter of an hour’s talk with him, I asked myself what experience could really do, that innocence had not done, to make it bright and fine.  I was struck with his deep enjoyment of the whole spectacle of foreign life—­its novelty, its picturesqueness, its light and shade—­and with the infinite freedom with which he felt he could go and come and rove and linger and observe it all.  It was an expansion, an awakening, a coming to moral manhood.  Each time I met him he spoke a little less of Madame Blumenthal; but he let me know generally that he saw her often, and continued to admire her.  I was forced to admit to myself, in spite of preconceptions, that if she were really the ruling star of this happy season, she must be a very superior woman.  Pickering had the air of an ingenuous young philosopher sitting at the feet of an austere muse, and not of a sentimental spendthrift dangling about some supreme incarnation of levity.

CHAPTER II.

Madame Blumenthal seemed, for the time, to have abjured the Kursaal, and I never caught a glimpse of her.  Her young friend, apparently, was an interesting study, and the studious mind prefers seclusion.

She reappeared, however, at last, one evening at the opera, where from my chair I perceived her in a box, looking extremely pretty.  Adelina Patti was singing, and after the rising of the curtain I was occupied with the stage; but on looking round when it fell for the entr’acte, I saw that the authoress of “Cleopatra” had been joined by her young admirer.  He was sitting a little behind her, leaning forward, looking over her shoulder and listening, while she, slowly moving her fan to and fro and letting her eye wander over the house, was apparently talking of this person and that.  No doubt she was saying sharp things; but Pickering was not laughing; his eyes were following her covert indications; his mouth was half open, as it always