a master of languages, of elegant though subdued deportment, and I extolled at length your saintly habits.  Altogether, I fear there may have been too much of the virtuoso in my interpretation of you; few would have recognized from it the gentleman who closed a table at Monte Carlo and afterwards was closed himself in the handsome and spectacular fashion I remember with both delight and regret.  Briefly, I lied like a master.  He almost had me in the matter of your age; it was important that you should be middle-aged.  I swore that you were at least thirty-eight, but, owing to exemplary habits, looked very much younger.  The cub himself is twenty-four.

“Hence, if you are really serious and determined not to appeal to your people, call at once upon Mr. Lambert R. Poor, of the Hotel d’Iena.  He is the father, and the cub is with him.  The elder Yankee is primed with my praises of you, and must engage someone at once, as he sails in a day or two.  Go—­with my blessing, an air of piety, and as much age as you can assume.  When the father has departed, throw the cub into the Seine, but preserve his pocket-book, and we shall have another go at those infernal tables.  Vale!  J.G.S.”

I found myself smiling—­I fear miserably—­over this kind letter, especially at the wonder of my friend that I had not appealed to my relatives.  The only ones who would have liked to help me, if they had known I needed something, were my two little nieces who were in my own care; because my father, being but a poet, had no family, and my mother had lost hers, even her eldest son, by marrying my father.  After that they would have nothing to do with her, nor were they asked.  That rascally old Antonio was now the head of all the Caravacioli, as was I of my own outcast branch of our house—­that is, of my two little nieces and myself.  It was partly of these poor infants I had thought when I took what was left of my small inheritance to Monte Carlo, hoping, since I seemed to be incapable of increasing it in any other way, that number seventeen and black would hand me over a fortune as a waiter does wine.  Alas!  Luck is not always a fool’s servant, and the kind of fortune she handed me was of that species the waiter brings you in the other bottle of champagne, the gold of a bubbling brain, lasting an hour.  After this there is always something evil to one’s head, and mine, alas! was shaved.

Half an hour after I had read the letter, the little paper-flower makers in the attic window across from mine may have seen me shaving it—­without pleasure—­again.  What else was I to do?  I could not well expect to be given the guardianship of an erring young man if I presented myself to his parent as a gentleman who had been sitting at the Cafe’ de la Paix with his head painted.  I could not wear my hat through the interview.  I could not exhibit the thick five days’ stubble, to appear in contrast with the heavy fringe that had been spared;—­I could not trim the fringe to the shortness of the stubble; I should have looked like Pierrot.  I had only, then, to remain bald, and, if I obtained the post, to shave in secret—­a harmless and mournful imposition.