“Monsieur hurts me,” the spinster protested.

“Go then! Go then!” said the Tante, as the beloved nephew directed his assault upon her in turn. She was grimly proud of him. He flattered her eye, for, even at his loosest, he had a professional distinction of deportment which her long-deceased husband, a wholesale tradesman, had probably lacked.

“Well, my old one,” the host grasped my hand once more, “you cannot figure to yourself how it gives me pleasure to have you here!” His voice was rich with emotion.

This man had the genius of friendship in a very high degree. His delight in the society of his friends was so intense and so candid that only the most inordinately conceited among them could have failed to be aware of an uncomfortable grave sense of unworthiness, could have failed to say to themselves fearfully: “He will find me out one day!”

The dining-room was large, and massively furnished, and lighted by one immense shaded lamp that hung low over the table. Among the heavily framed pictures was a magnificent Jules DuprÉ, belonging to the Tante. She had picked it up long ago at a sale for something like ten thousand francs, apparently while the dealers were looking the other way. It was a known picture, and one of the Tante’s satisfactions was that some dealer or other was always trying to relieve her of it, without the slightest success. She had a story, too, that on the day after the sale a Duchesse who affected DuprÉs had sent her footman offering to take the picture off her at a ten per cent, increase because it would make a pair with another magnificent DuprÉ already owned by the Duchesse. “Eh, well,” the widow of the tradesman had said to the footman, “you will tell Madame la Duchesse that if she wants my picture she had better come herself and inquire about it.” In the flat, the DuprÉ was one of the great pictures of the world. Safer to sneeze at the Venus de Milo than at that picture! Another favourite picture, also the property of Tante, was one by a living and super-modern painter, an acquaintance of another nephew of hers. I do not think she much cared for it, or that she cared much for any pictures. She had bought it by a benevolent caprice. “What would you? He had not the sou. C’est un trÈs gentil garÇon, of a great talent, but he was eating all his money with women—with those birds that you know. And one day it may be worth its price.”

What always interested me most in the furniture of that dining-room was not the pictures, nor the ample plate, nor the edifices called sideboards, etc., but the apron of Marthe, who served. A plain, unstarched, white apron, without a bib—an apron that no English parlourmaid would have deigned to wear; but of such fine linen, and all the exactly geometric creases of its folding visible to the eye as Marthe passed round and round our four chairs! Whenever I saw that apron I could see linen-chests, and endless supplies of linen, and Tante and Marthe fussing over them on quiet afternoons. And it went so well with her dark-blue shiny frock! When Tante had joined her nephew’s household she had brought with her Marthe, already old in her service. These two women were devoted to each other, each in her own way. “Arrive then, with that sauce, vieille folle!” Tante would command; and Marthe, pursing her lips, would defend herself with a “Mais madame—!” There was no high invisible wall between Marthe and her employers. One was not worried, as one would have been in England, by the operation of the detestable and barbaric theory that Marthe was an automaton, inaccessible to human emotions. I remember seeing in the work-basket of the wife of a wealthy English socialist a little manual of advice to domestic servants upon their deportment, and I remember this: “Learn to control your voice, and always speak in a low voice. Never show by your demeanour that you have heard any remark which is not addressed to you.” I wonder what Marthe, who had never worn a cap, nor perhaps seen one, would have thought of the manual, which possibly was written by a distressed gentlewoman in order to earn a few shillings. Martha could smile. She could even laugh and answer back—but within limits. We had not to pretend that Marthe consisted merely of two ministering hands animated by a brain, but without a soul. In France a servant works longer and harder than in England, but she is permitted the constant use of a soul.

A simple but an expensive dinner, for these people were the kind of people that, desiring only the best, were in a position to see that they had it, and accepted the cost as a matter of course. Moreover, they knew what the best was, especially the Tante. They knew how to buy. The chief dish was just steak. But what steak! What a thickness of steak and what tenderness! A whole cow had lived under the most approved conditions, and died a violent death, and the very essence of the excuse for it all lay on a blue and white dish in front of the hostess. Cost according! Steak; but better steak could not be had in the world! And the consciousness of this fact was on the calm benignant face of the hostess and on the vivacious ironic face of the Tante. So with the fruits of the earth, so with the wine. And the simple, straightforward distribution of the viands seemed to suit well their character. Into that flat there had not yet penetrated the grand modern principle that the act of carving is an obscene act, an act to be done shamefully in secret, behind the backs of the delicate impressionable. No! The dish of steak was planted directly in front of the hostess, under her very nose, and beyond the dish a pile of four plates; and, brazenly brandishing her implements, the Parisienne herself cut the titbits out of the tit-bit, and deposited them on plate after plate, which either Marthe took or we took ourselves, at hazard. Further, there was no embarrassment of multitudinous assorted knives and forks and spoons. With each course the diner received the tools necessary for that course. Between courses, if he wanted a toy for his fingers, he had to be content with a crust.

During the meal the conversation constantly reverted with pleasure to the question of food; it was diversified by expressions of the host’s joy in his home, and the beings therein; and for the rest it did not ascend higher than heterogeneous personal gossip,—“unstitched,” as the French say.

Instead of going into the drawing-room, we went through a bed-chamber, into a small room at the back. By taking a circuitous service-passage, and infringing on the kitchen, we might ultimately have arrived at that room without passing through the bedchamber; but the proper, the ceremonious way to it was through the bedchamber. This trifling detail illuminates the methods of the French architect even when he is building expensively—methods which persist to the present hour. Admirable at faÇades, he is an execrable planner, wasteful and maladroit, as may be seen even in the most important public buildings in Paris—such as the Town Hall. In arranging the “disposition” of flats, he exhausts himself on the principal apartments, and then, fatigued, lets the others struggle as best they may for light and air and access in the odd corners of space which remain. Of course, he is strong in the sympathy of his clients. It is a wide question of manners, stretching from the finest palaces of France down to the labyrinthine coverts of industrialism. Up to twenty-five years ago, architects simply did not consider the factors of either light or ventilation. I have myself lived in a flat, in one of the best streets of central Paris, of which none of the eight windows could possibly at any period of the year receive a single direct gleam of sunlight. Up to twenty-five years ago, nobody had discovered a reason why, in a domestic interior, a bedroom should not be a highroad.. . .

Visualise the magnificent straight boulevard, full of the beautiful horizontal glidings of trams and automobiles; the lofty and stylistic frontages; the great carved doors of the house; the quasi-Oriental entrance and courtyard, shut in from the fracas of the street; the monumental staircase; the spacious and even splendid dining-room; and then the bedroom opening directly off it; and then the still smaller sitting-room opening directly off that; and us there—the ebullient doctor, his elegant and calm wife, the Tante (on a small chair), and myself—sitting round a lamp amid a miscellany of bookcases and oddments. This was the room that the doctor preferred of an evening. He would say, joyously: “C’est le dÉcor home!”

A cousin of the host was announced; and his relatives and I smiled archly, with affectionate malice, before he came in; for it was notorious that this cousin, an architect by profession, and a bachelor of forty years standing, had a few days earlier solemnly and definitely “broken” with his petite amie. I knew it. Everybody knew it within the wide family-radius. It was one of those things that “knew themselves.” This call was itself a proof that the cousin had dragged his anchor. Moreover, he embraced his aunt with a certain self-consciousness. He was a tall, dark-bearded man, well dressed in a dark-grey suit—a good specimen of French tailoring, but a French tailor cannot use an iron and he cannot “roll” a collar. A rather melancholy and secretive and flaccid man, but somewhat hardened and strengthened by the lifelong use of a private fortune. They all had money—money of their own, independently of earned money; the wife had money—and I do not think that it occurred to any of them to live up to his or her income; their resources were always increasing, and the reserves that the united family could have brought up to face a calamity must have been formidable. None of them had ever been worried about money, and by reason of their financial ideals they were far more solid than a London family receiving, but spending, thrice their income.

Marthe came with another coffee cup, and the cousin, when the hostess had filled it, set it down to go cold, after the French manner.

“Well, my boy,” said Tante, whose ancient eyes were sparkling with eagerness. “By what appears, thou art a widower since several days.”

“How a widower?”

“Yes,” said the host, “it appears that thou art a widower.” And added enthusiastically: “I am pretty content to see thee, my old one.”

The hostess smiled at the widower with sympathetic indulgence.

“Who has told you?”

“What! Who has told us? All Paris knows it!”

“Well,” said the cousin, looking at the carpet and apparently communing with himself—he always had an air of self-communing, “I suppose it’s true!” He drank the tenth of a teaspoonful of coffee.

“Eh, well, my friend,” the Tante commented. “I do not know if thou hast done well. That did not cost thee too dear, and she had a good-hearted face.” Tante spoke with an air of special intimacy, because she and the cousin had kept house together for some years at one period.

“Thou hast seen her, Tante?” the hostess asked, surprised a little out of the calm in which she was crocheting.

“Have I seen her? I believe it well! I caught them together once when I was driving in the Bois.”

“That was Antoinette,” said the cousin.

“It was not Antoinette,” said the Tante. “And thou hast no need to say it. Thou quittedst Antoinette in ‘96, before I had begun to hire that carriage. I recall it to myself perfectly.”

“I suppose now it will be the grand spree,” said the hostess, “during several months.”

“The grand spree!” Tante broke in caustically. “Have no fear. The grand spree—that is not his kind. It is not he who will scatter his money with those birds. He is not so stupid as that.” She laughed drily.

“Is she rosse, the Tante, all the same!” the host, flowing over with good nature, comforted his cousin.

Then Marthe entered again:

“The children demand monsieur.”

The host bounded up from his chair.

“What! The children demand monsieur!” he exploded. “At nine o’clock! It is not possible that they are not asleep!”

“They say that monsieur promised to return to them after dinner.”

“It is true!” he admitted, with a gesture of discovery. “It is true!”

“I pray thee,” said the mother. “Go at once. And do not excite them.”

“I think I’ll go with you,” I said.

“My little Bennett,” the mother leaned towards me, “I supplicate you—at this hour—”

“But naturally he will come with me!” the host cried obstreperously.

We went, down a long narrow passage. There they were in their beds, the children, in a small bedroom divided into two by a low screen of ribbed glass, the boy on one side and the girl on the other. The window gave on to a small subsidiary courtyard. Through the half-drawn curtains the lighted windows of rooms opposite could be discerned, rising, storey after storey, up out of sight. A night-light burned on a table. The nurse stood apart, at the door. The children were lively, but pale. They had begun to go to school, and, except the journey to and from school, they seemed to have almost no outdoor exercise. No garden was theirs. The hall and the passages were their sole playground. And all the best part of their lives was passed between walls in a habitation twenty-five or thirty feet above ground, in the middle of Paris. Yet they were very well. The doctor did not romp with them. No! He simply and candidly caressed them, girl and boy, in turn, calling them passionately by the most beautiful names, burying his head in the bedclothes, and fondling their wild hair. He then entreated them, with genuine humility, to compose themselves for sleep, and parted last from the girl.

“She is exquisite—exquisite!” he murmured to me ecstatically, as we returned up the passage from this excursion.

She was.

In the small sitting-room the cousin was offering to the Tante some information of a political nature. The Tante kept a judicious eye on everything in Paris. .

“What!” The host protested vociferously. “He is again in his politics! Cousin, I supplicate thee—”

A good deal of supplication went on there. The host did succeed in stopping politics. With all the weight of his vivacious good-nature he bore politics down. The fact was, he had a real objection to politics, having convinced himself that they were permanently unclean in France. It was not the measures that he objected to, but the men—all of them with scarcely an exception—as cynical adventurers. On this point he was passionate. Politics were incurably futile, horribly assommant. He would not willingly allow them to soil his hearth.

“What hast thou done lately?” he asked of the cousin, changing the subject.

And the talk veered to public amusements. The cousin had been “distracting himself” amid his sentimental misadventures, by much theatre-going. They all, except the Tante, went very regularly to the theatres and to the operas. And not only that, but to concerts, exhibitions, picture-shows, services in the big churches, and every kind of diversion frequented by people in easy circumstances and by artists. There was little that they missed. They exhibited no special taste or knowledge in any art, but leaned generally to the best among that which was merely fashionable. They took seriously nearly every craftsman who, while succeeding, kept his dignity and refrained from being a mountebank. Thus, they were convinced that dramatists like Edmond Rostand and Henri Lavedan, actors and actresses like Le Bargy and CÉcile Sorel, painters like Edouard DÉtaille and La Gandara, composers like Massenet and Charpentier, critics like Adolphe Brisson and Francis Chevassu, novelists like RenÉ Bazin and Daniel Lesueur, poets like Jean Riche-pin and Abel Bonnard, were original and first-class, and genuinely important in the history of their respective arts. On the other hand their attitude towards the real innovators and shapers of the future was timidly, but honestly, antipathetic. And they could not, despite any theorising to the contrary, bring themselves to take quite seriously any artist who had not been consecrated by public approval. With the most charming grace they would submit to be teased about this, but it would have been impossible to tease them out of it. And there was always a slight uneasiness in the air when they and I came to grips in the discussion of art. I could almost hear the shrewd Tante saying to herself: “What a pity this otherwise sane and safe young man is an artist!”

“Figure to yourself,” the host would answer me with an adorable, affectionate mien of apology, when I asked his opinion of a new work by Maurice Ravel, heard on a Sunday afternoon, “Figure to yourself that we scarcely liked it.”

And with the same mien, of a very fashionable comedy in which Lavedan, Le Bargy, and Julia Bartet had combined to create a terrific success at the ThÉÂtre FranÇais:

“Figure to yourself, it was truly very nice, after all! Of course one might say.. . .”

The truth was, it had carried them off their feet.

Upon my soul I think I liked them the better for it all. And, in talking to them, I understood a little better the real and solid basis upon which rests all that overwhelming, complex, expensive apparatus of artistic diversions laid out for the public within a mile radius of the Place de l’OpÉra. There is a public, a genuine public, which desires ardently to be amused and which will handsomely put down the money for its amusement. And it is never tired, never satiated. The artist, who seldom pays, is apt to wonder if any considerable body of persons pay, is apt to regard the commercial continuance of art as a sort of inexplicable miracle. But these people paid. They always paid, and richly. And there were whole streets of large houses full of other people who shared their tastes and their habits, if not their extreme attractiveness.

I wondered where we should be without them, we artists, as I took leave of them at something after midnight. My good friend, the melancholy cousin, had departed. Tante had gone to bed, though she protested she never slept. We had been drinking weak tea as we wandered about the dining-room. And now I, obdurate against the host’s supplications not to desert them so early, was departing too. At the door the hostess lighted a little taper, and gave it to me. And when the door was opened they moderated their caressing voices; for a dozen other domestic interiors, each intricate and complete, gave on the resounding staircase. And with my little taper I descended through the silence and the darkness of the staircase. And at the bottom I halted in the black entrance way, and summoned the concierge out of his sleep to release the catch of the small door within the great portals. There was a responsive click immediately, and in the blackness a sudden gleam from the boulevard. The concierge and his wife, living for ever sunless in a room and a half beneath all those other interiors, were throughout the night at the mercy of a call, mine or another’s. “Curious existence!” I thought, as my shutting of the door echoed about the building, and I stepped into the illumination of the boulevard. “The concierge is necessary to them. And without the equivalent of such as they, such as I could not possess even a decent overcoat!” On the faÇade of the house every outer casement was shut. Not a sign of life in it.