a pony and a dog-cart; Aunt Louisa had heard of the rich uncle, but as he was married and had children before Emily was born she could never have had much hope of inheriting his fortune.  Miss Wilkinson had little good to say of Berlin, where she was now in a situation.  She complained of the vulgarity of German life, and compared it bitterly with the brilliance of Paris, where she had spent a number of years.  She did not say how many.  She had been governess in the family of a fashionable portrait-painter, who had married a Jewish wife of means, and in their house she had met many distinguished people.  She dazzled Philip with their names.  Actors from the Comedie Francaise had come to the house frequently, and Coquelin, sitting next her at dinner, had told her he had never met a foreigner who spoke such perfect French.  Alphonse Daudet had come also, and he had given her a copy of Sappho:  he had promised to write her name in it, but she had forgotten to remind him.  She treasured the volume none the less and she would lend it to Philip.  Then there was Maupassant.  Miss Wilkinson with a rippling laugh looked at Philip knowingly.  What a man, but what a writer!  Hayward had talked of Maupassant, and his reputation was not unknown to Philip.

“Did he make love to you?” he asked.

The words seemed to stick funnily in his throat, but he asked them nevertheless.  He liked Miss Wilkinson very much now, and was thrilled by her conversation, but he could not imagine anyone making love to her.

“What a question!” she cried.  “Poor Guy, he made love to every woman he met.  It was a habit that he could not break himself of.”

She sighed a little, and seemed to look back tenderly on the past.

“He was a charming man,” she murmured.

A greater experience than Philip’s would have guessed from these words the probabilities of the encounter:  the distinguished writer invited to luncheon en famille, the governess coming in sedately with the two tall girls she was teaching; the introduction: 

“Notre Miss Anglaise.”

“Mademoiselle.”

And the luncheon during which the Miss Anglaise sat silent while the distinguished writer talked to his host and hostess.

But to Philip her words called up much more romantic fancies.

“Do tell me all about him,” he said excitedly.

“There’s nothing to tell,” she said truthfully, but in such a manner as to convey that three volumes would scarcely have contained the lurid facts.  “You mustn’t be curious.”

She began to talk of Paris.  She loved the boulevards and the Bois.  There was grace in every street, and the trees in the Champs Elysees had a distinction which trees had not elsewhere.  They were sitting on a stile now by the high-road, and Miss Wilkinson looked with disdain upon the stately elms in front of them.  And the theatres:  the plays were brilliant, and the acting was incomparable.  She often went with Madame Foyot, the mother of the girls she was educating, when she was trying on clothes.