He lives a well-ordered life; he has always led that kind of life.  Even in his student days when I first knew him, I do not remember an occasion upon which the principal of a New England high-school would have criticised his conduct.  And yet I never heard anyone call him a prig; and, so far as I know, no one was ever so stupid as to think him one.  He was a quiet, good-looking, well-dressed boy, and he matured into a somewhat reserved, well-poised man, of impressive distinction in appearance and manner.  He has always been well tended and cared for by women; in his student days his mother lived with him; his sister, Miss Elizabeth, looks after him now.  She came with him when he returned to Paris after his disappointment in the unfortunate Harman affair, and she took charge of all his business—­as well as his social—­arrangements (she has been accused of a theory that the two things may be happily combined), making him lease a house in an expensively modish quarter near the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne.  Miss Elizabeth is an instinctively fashionable woman, practical withal, and to her mind success should be not only respectable but “smart.”  She does not speak of the “right bank” and the “left bank” of the Seine; she calls them the “right bank” and the “wrong bank.”  And yet, though she removed George (her word is “rescued”) from many of his old associations with Montparnasse, she warmly encouraged my friendship with him—­yea, in spite of my living so deep in the wrong bank that the first time he brought her to my studio, she declared she hadn’t seen anything so like Bring-the-child-to-the-old-hag’s-cellar-at-midnight since her childhood.  She is a handsome woman, large, and of a fine, high colour; her manner is gaily dictatorial, and she and I got along very well together.

Probably she appreciated my going to some pains with the clothes I wore when I went to their house.  My visits there were infrequent, not because I had any fear of wearing out a welcome, but on account of Miss Elizabeth’s “day,” when I could see nothing of George for the crowd of lionising women and time-wasters about him.  Her “day” was a dread of mine; I could seldom remember which day it was, and when I did she had a way of shifting it so that I was fatally sure to run into it—­to my misery, for, beginning with those primordial indignities suffered in youth, when I was scrubbed with a handkerchief outside the parlour door as a preliminary to polite usages, my childhood’s, manhood’s prayer has been:  From all such days, Good Lord, deliver me!

It was George’s habit to come much oftener to see me.  He always really liked the sort of society his sister had brought about him; but now and then there were intervals when it wore on him a little, I think.  Sometimes he came for me in his automobile and we would make a mild excursion to breakfast in the country; and that is what happened one morning about three weeks after the day when we had sought pure air in the Luxembourg gardens.