“Elle est morte et n’a point vÉcu.”

Who does not know the sensation that besets an ordinary man on entering a familiar room, where, during his absence, some change has been made?—a piece of furniture moved, an old hanging taken down, a new picture put up?—that teasing sense of strangeness, which, if subordinate to the business of the moment, yet persists, uncomfortably formless, till, for instance, the presiding genius of the place inquires, “How do you like the way we have moved the piano?” or something else happens to crystallise the sufferer’s mere vague feeling into a perception; after which his spirit may be at rest again?

When I woke this morning, here in my own dingy furnished room, in this most dingy lodging-house, I had an experience very like that I mean to suggest: something seemed wrong and unusual, something had been changed overnight. This was the more perplexing, because my door had remained locked and bolted ever since I had tucked myself into bed; and within the room, after all, there isn’t much to change; only the bed itself, and the armoire, and my writing-table, and my wash-hand-stand, and my two dilapidated chairs; and these were still where they belonged. So were the shabby green window-curtains, the bilious green paper on the walls, the dismal green baldaquin above my head. Nevertheless, a tantalising sense of something changed, of something taken away, of an unwonted vacancy, haunted me through the brewing and the drinking of my coffee, and through the first few whiffs of my cigarette. Then I put on my hat, and “went to school,” and forgot about it.

But when I came back, in the afternoon, I found that whatever the cause might be of my curious psychical disturbance, it had not ceased to act. No sooner had I got seated at my table, and begun to arrange my notes, than down upon me settled, stronger if possible than ever, that inexplicable feeling of emptiness in the room, of strangeness, of an accustomed something gone. What could it mean? It was disquieting, exasperating; it interfered with my work. I must investigate it, and put an end to it, if I could.

But just at that moment the current of my ideas was temporarily turned by somebody rapping on my door. I called out, “Entrez!” and there entered a young lady: a young lady in black, with soiled yellow ribbons, and on her cheeks a little artificial bloom. The effect of this, however, was mitigated by a series of flesh-colored ridges running through it; and as the young person’s eyes, moreover, were red and humid, I concluded that she had been shedding tears. I looked at her for two or three seconds without being able to think who she was; but before she had pronounced her “B’jour, monsieur,” I remembered: Madame Germaine, the friend of poor little Zizi, my next-door neighbour. And then, in a flash, the reason appeared to me for my queer dim feeling of something not as usual in my surroundings, I had not heard Zizi cough! That was it! Zizi, the poor little girl in the adjoining room,—behind that door against which my armoire stands,—who for three months past has scarcely left the house, but has coughed, coughed, coughed perpetually: so that every night I have fallen asleep, and every morning wakened, and every day pursued my indoor occupations, to that distressing sound. Oh, our life is not all cakes and ale, here in the Quarter; we have our ennuis, as well as the rest of mankind; and when we are too poor to change our lodgings, we must be content to abide in patience—whatever sounds our neighbours choose to make.

At all events, so it came to pass that the sight of Madame Germaine, in her soiled finery, cleared up my problem for me: Zizi had not coughed. And I said to myself, “Ah, the poor little thing is better, and is spending the day out of doors.” (It has been a lovely day, soft as April, though in midwinter; and my inference, therefore, was not overdrawn.) “And Madame Germaine,” I proceeded rapidly, “has come to see her; and finding her away, has looked in on me.”

Meanwhile my visitor stood still, just within the threshold, and gazed solemnly, almost reproachfully, at me with her big protruding eyes: eyes that, protruding always far more than enough, seemed now, swollen by recent weeping, fairly ready to leave their sockets. What had she been crying for, I wondered. Then I began our conversation with a cheery “Zizi isn’t there?”

“Ah, m’sieu! Ah, la pauv’ Zizi!”! was her response, in a sort of hysterical gasp; and two fresh tears rolled down her cheeks, making further havoc of her rouge. She took a few steps forward, and sank into my arm-chair. “La pauv’ petite!” she sobbed, I was puzzled, of course, and a little troubled. “What is it? What is the matter?” I asked. “Zizi isn’t worse, surely? I haven’t heard her cough all day.”

“Oh, no, m’sieu, she isn’t worse. Oh, no, she—she is dead.”

I don’t need to recount any more of my interview with Madame Germaine, though it lasted a good half-hour longer, and was sufficiently vivacious. I can’t describe to you the shock her announcement caused me, nor the chill and despondency that have been growing on me ever since. Zizi—dead? Zizi and Death!—the notions are too awfully incongruous. I look at the door that separates our rooms,—the door athwart which, in former times, I have heard so many bursts of laughter, snatches of song, when Zizi would be entertaining her——she called them “friends;” and, latterly, that hacking, unyielding cough of hers,—I look at the door, and a sort of cold and blackness seems to creep in from its edges; and then I fancy the darkened chamber beyond it, with the open window, and Zizi’s little form stretched on the bed, stark and dead,—poor little chirping, chattering, ribald Zizi! Oh, it is ghastly. And all her trumpery, twopenny fripperies round about her, their occupation gone: her sham jewels, and her flounces, and her tawdry furs and laces, and her powder-puffs and rouge-pots—though it was only towards the end that Zizi took to rouge. It is as if they were to tell you that a doll is dead: can such things die? They are not wholly inhuman, then?

They have viscera? are made of real flesh and blood? can experience real pains? and—and die? Here are you and I, serious folk, not without some sense of the solemnity and mystery of God’s creation, here are we still working the first degree of our arcana,—Life; and yonder lies that tinselled little gewgaw, admitted to the second! She has passed the dread portals, she has accomplished the miracle of Death! She was vain and shallow and hard: she was malicious: she was shameless in her speech as in her conduct: she was lively, it is true, and merry-mannered, and pretty: but she had no affections, no illusions, no remorse; and lies dropped like toads from her mouth whenever she opened it: yet she is dead! And to-morrow women (who would have shrunk from her in her lifetime, as from something pestilential) will reverently cross themselves, and men (who would have.... ah, well, it is best not to remember what the men would have done) will decently bare their heads, as her poor coffin is borne through the streets on its way to the graveyard. Isn’t it ghastly? Isn’t it quite enough to depress a fellow, to sober him up, when there is only a thin partition, broken by a door, to separate him from such a death-chamber?—Wait; I must tell you something about Zizi, as I have known her.

Long before our personal acquaintance began I used to see her here and there in the Quarter: at the Bullier balls, or the CafÉ Vachette, or in the Luxembourg or the Boule-Miche when the weather was fine: and to admire her as a singularly inoffensive specimen of her class. Those were her palmy days. Her “friend” was a student of law, from the Quartier Marbouf, with a pocketful of money and a pointed beard. She was the smallest of possible little women, no higher than her law-student’s heart, if he had one; and he was only a medium-sized Frenchman. She was very daintily formed, with fine hands and feet; she had a great quantity of black hair, and a pair of bright black eyes. Her face was pale, and decidedly an interesting face: pert, if you please, and tremendously mischievous, but suggestive of wit, of intelligence, even of humour and passion: a most uncommon face, with character in it,—I believe I may even say with distinction. It was a face you would have noticed anywhere, to wonder who and what its owner might be. And then she used to dress very well, very quietly: in refined grays or blacks: there was absolutely nothing in her dress to betray her place in the world’s economy: passing her in the street, you would have taken her for an entirely irreproachable little housewife, with an unusually interesting face. I used to see her in all the pleasure-resorts of the Quarter, ami to admire her, and speculate about her in a languid, melancholy way. Then I left town for the summer; and when I came back last September I established myself here in the HÔtel du Saint Esprit.

The first morning after my arrival I was awakened by queer but unambiguous noises coming through that door, there behind my armoire; a strident laugh, and a few hardy exclamations, that could leave me in no doubt as to the sex and quality of my fellow-lodger. An hour or two later I encountered Zizi on the landing; and the concierge informed me that she was the tenant of the next room to my own. Such a neighbourship would horrify you in London or New York: but we think nothing of accidents much worse than that, here in the Latin Quarter of Paris. Afterwards, night and morning, and more especially in those small hours that are properly both or neither, I would hear Zizi’s laughter beyond our dividing door; her laughter, or her thin little voice raised in a stupid song, or the murmur of light talk, that would sometimes leap to the pitch of anger, for I suspect that Zizi’s temper was uncertain; and then, rare at first, but recurring more and more frequently, till it became quite the dominant note, her hard, dry, racking little cough.

Elinor was in Paris about this time. To my great joy, she had come to pass the autumn, and perhaps the winter too; and she was very anxious that I should show her something of the seamy side of life here. She had taken lodgings on the other—the right and wrong—bank of the river; and every afternoon, my day’s work done, I would join her there, and we would go off together for little excursions into Bohemia. I happened to be extraordinarily flush for the moment; I had nearly two hundred pounds of ready money; and this was a help. Of course I took her to the Moulin Rouge, which disgusted her, as I had warned her that it would; and to the Chat Noir, which amused her; and I was fortunate enough to get two seats for a performance at the ThÉÂtre Libre, which both amused and disgusted her at once; and I introduced her to the jerry-built splendours of Bullier; and we took long delightful walks together in the Luxembourg, where she would feed the sparrows with crumbs of unnutritious bread; and we lunched, dined, and supped together in an infinite number of droll restaurants; and now and then we went slumming in the far north, or east, or south; and Pousset’s knew us, and Vachette’s; and sometimes,’ for the fun or the convenience of the thing, we would drop in among the demi-gomme of the CafÉ de la Paix: and she would have been altogether happy and contented save for a single unfulfilled desire. She wanted to make acquaintance with some member of the sisterhood of Sainte Grisette; she wanted, as a literary woman, to see what such an one would be like; to convince herself whether or not they were as black as I had painted them, for I had painted them very black indeed.

“Well,” I said at last, “you’ll be sorry for it, but since you won’t take no for an answer, I’ll see what can be done.”

Then one afternoon I was waiting for her by appointment, in that very CafÉ de la Paix, when whom should I see enter, and ensconce themselves in a back room, but my neighbour Zizi, and her friend of the ribbons, Madame Germaine. “When Elinor arrives,” I thought, “and if her heart is still set on that sort of thing, I will introduce Zizi to her: for Zizi is as nearly innocuous as a microbe of her variety very well can be.” Elinor arrived a moment later: beautiful, strong, gracious, and pure as a May morning: and I proposed the measure to her; and her instant decision was, “Oh, yes, by all means.” So she and I penetrated into the backroom, and took the table next to Zizi’s; and presently Zizi gave me a sly little covert glance and smile; and therewith I invited her and her companion to come and sit with us.

“Madame permits?” demanded Zizi, raising her eyebrows, astonished at such magnanimity on the part of a fellow-woman. Elinor smiled assent; and the two Étudiantes rose and placed themselves before our own slab of marble. I asked them what they would take; of course they commanded each a menthe À l’eau. But though I tried to suit the conversation to their taste and level, they were not perfectly at ease. The presence of Elinor, whom, for all that she was alone with a man in the CafÉ de la Paix, they could perceive with half an eye to be a bird of a totally different feather to their own, embarrassed them a good deal. Their desire to appear well before her, their determined best behaviour, tied their tongues, and made them surpassingly dull; for when they are not flavoured lavishly with Gallic salt, they are unimaginably insipid, these little soubrettes in the comedy of evil. However, before we broke up, I had engaged them to breakfast with us on the Sunday to follow. We were all to meet at Fousset’s in the Boulevard at noon, and thence we would proceed to the Abbaye de ThÉlÈme, where I would bespeak a cabinet particulier.

The Abbaye de ThÉlÈme is the riskiest of restaurants in a most risky quarter: but Elinor wanted to see the seamy side of Parisian life, and I was resolved to satisfy her once for all with a drastic measure of it.

“Voyez-vous,” I heard Zizi boasting to her, in a whisper, “it is forbidden for women to come alone to this cafÉ. But I am an honest girl. The gÉrant knows me. They make no objection to me or to my friends. Adieu, madame. Au revoir, proche,”—this last to me. Proche, indeed! But in the Latin Quarter the word is often used as a substitute for voisin. Then Zizi took her small self off, followed by Germaine.

“Well,” I queried, as soon as Elinor and I were alone, “is your thirst for experience satisfied? Are you happy at last?”

“I am overcome with bewilderment. Who would have known that they weren’t simply two ordinary bourgeoises? There wasn’t anything rowdy or shocking about them.”

“What! The rouge? The ribbons? The bulging eyes?”

“Oh, I wasn’t thinking of that one. I didn’t care much for her. Still, even she looked no worse than—well, a shop-girl. But the other, the little one. I shouldn’t have been surprised to meet her anywhere,—at Madame X———’s, at Madame de Z———-’.. She was dressed so quietly, in such good taste. Her manners were so subdued, almost English. And her face,—it’s a face that would strike you anywhere. So delicate, refined, so quaint and interesting. She doesn’t rouge. And such lovely hair! Oh, I am sure she is full of good qualities. What a shame and horror it is that... that... It makes one feel inclined to loathe your whole sex.”

Elinor’s commentary at this point became a lamentation, which it would be irrelevant to repeat. “I must get her to tell me her story,” was its conclusion.

“Oh, she’ll tell you her story fast enough, only, I warn you, it will be a pack of lies. The truth isn’t in them, those little puppets. Don’t cherish any illusions about her. The most one can say for her is that she’s a fairly harmless example of a desperately bad class. The grisette of Musset, of Henry Murger, exists no longer, even if she ever did exist. To-day Zizi was on her good behaviour. Sunday, I hope for the sake of science, she’ll get off it, and be her wicked little self. Yes, her face is remarkable, but it’s an absurd accident, a slip of nature: not one of the qualities it would seem to indicate is anywhere in her—neither wit nor humour nor emotion. She’s just a little undersized cat; not a kitten: she has none of the innocent gentleness of a kitten: an undergrown, hard, sprightly little cat. However, she can be amusing enough when she’s roused; and on Sunday we are likely to have a merry breakfast.” But herein I proved myself a false prophet. We were still at the hors d’ouvres when Zizi began to cry. She had coughed; and Elinor had asked her if she had a cold; and that question precipitated a flood of tears. This was dispiriting. It is always dispiriting to see one of these creatures anything but gay and flippant: serious feeling is so crudely, so garishly, at variance with your preconception of them, with the mood in which you approach them. And yet they cry a good deal,—mostly, however, tears of mere spite or vexed vanity; or, it may be, of hysteria, for they are frightfully subject to what they call crises de nerfs. But Zizi’s tears now were of a different water. Had she a cold? Oh, no, it was worse than that. The doctor said her lungs were affected; and if she didn’t speedily change her mode of life, she must go into a decline. And this, if you please, was the dish laid on our table, there in the vulgar cabinet particulier of that shady restaurant, under the crystal gasalier, and between the four diamond-scratched looking-glasses that covered the walls,—this was the dish served to us even before the oysters; and you may imagine, therefore, with what appetite we attacked the good things that came after. The doctor had told her that she must absolutely suspend her dissipations for at least a six-month, and rest, and soigner herself, and “feed up,” or she would surely become poitrinaire. “And do nothing? How can I? Faut vivre, parbleu!” Her present friend-in-chief, she explained, was at the School of Mines; his pension from his family only amounted to two hundred and fifty francs a month; he was all that is good, he would do his utmost for her; but she couldn’t live on what he could spare her out of two hundred and fifty francs a month.

With this she went off in a regular fit of hysterics; and Elinor had her hands full, trying to bring her round. Hysterics are infectious; and Madame Germaine sat in her place, and sobbed helplessly,—not in sympathy, but by infection,—whilst her tears fell into her plate.

I saw that Elinor was tremendously distressed, and I cursed the misinspired moment when I had arranged this feast. “Terrible, terrible!” she murmured, shaking her head and looking at me with pained eyes. When at length Zizi was calm again, Elinor asked, “You won’t mind if I speak with Monsieur in English?” and then said to me, “This is quite too dreadful. We must do something for her. We must save her from consumption; and perhaps at the same time we can redeem her, make a good woman of her. She has it in her.”

I respected Elinor’s sincerity too much to laugh at the utopian quality of her optimism: so I waived the latter of her remarks, and replied only to the former. “I should be glad to do anything possible for her, but I don’t exactly see what is possible. Besides, I don’t believe she’s threatened with consumption, any more than I am. This is a pose, to make herself interestingly pathetic in your eyes, and get some money. You’ll see—she’s going to strike me for fifty francs. It’s the sum they usually ask for. And she wants to win your sanction to the gift beforehand.”

Surely enough, Zizi lifted up her tearful face, its features all puffed out and empurpled, and said at this very moment, in a whimper that ought to have hardened the softest heart, “If Monsieur could give me a little money—a couple of louis—a fifty-franc note? I could buy medicines and things.”

“Nonsense,” said I, brutally; “you’d buy chiffons and things.”

She laughed without offence, and gave me a knowing glance, but protested, “Non, sÉrieusement, je veux me soigner.” Then she turned to Elinor, and pleaded coaxingly, “Madame, tell him to give me fifty francs—pour me soigner.”

“No,” Elinor replied; “he won’t give you fifty francs, but this is what he will do, what we will do. If you will obey the doctor’s orders, send your friends about their business, and lead a perfectly regular life for the time being, we will undertake to see that you want for nothing during the next six months. After that, nous verrons! For the present, that is what we offer you: six months in which to give yourself every chance for a cure. Only, during those six months—faut etre sage.”

Of course, Zizi began to cry again; and, of course, she could do nothing less than accept Madame’s proposition with some show of effusion: though I mistrusted the whole-heartedness of her acceptance; she would much rather have pocketed the fifty francs, and had done with us.

Elinor and she fell to discussing sundry practical details. Good and abundant food, warm clothing, healthful lodgings: these were the three desiderata that Elinor prescribed. As for the last, Zizi assured us that she already had them—“since I live in the same house as Monsieur,” she explained, convincingly.

But Elinor was not convinced. “Do your rooms face south?” was the question she insisted on.

Now Zizi, about the points of the compass, and such abstruse matters generally, had no more idea than I have of Sanskrit; yet, “Oh, yes, my room gives to the noon,” she answered, without turning a hair. “And, anyhow, it is a very nice room.—Come and see,” she added, impulsively. “I should be charmed to show you.”

“I suppose it will be all right?” Elinor asked of me.

“Oh, no worse than the rest,” I acquiesced.

And so we took a cab, and were driven to the Rue St. Jacques. Madame Germaine parted from us at the threshold of the eating-house. “I have an engagement in the Parc Monceau,” she informed us, in the candour of her heart. Zizi jeered at her a good deal as we drove across the town. “Her ribbons—hein? Her goggle-eyes! Not at all comme il faut. But a brave girl. She loves me like a sister. Monsieur smiles. No, word of honour, it is not as you think.” If I had thought as Zizi thought I thought, I shouldn’t have smiled; but she, of course, couldn’t be expected to understand that. “Poor Germaine! Her real name is Gobbeau, Marthe Gobbeau. She is stupid and ugly, but she is good-natured,” which was more, perhaps, than one could say with truth of her little critic. “Her mother is an ouvreuse in the ThÉÂtre de Belleville.”

“And her father?” queried Elinor.

“Her father!” cried Zizi, and she was about to continue, when it occurred to her to respect Elinor’s unsophistication. She gave me a furtive wink, and said, gravely, “Oh, her father lives in the twenty-first arrondissement.” Elinor was not aware that the arrondissements of Paris number only twenty, and so she could not realise either the double meaning or the antiquity of this evasion.

Zizi’s room was precisely like a thousand other rooms in the Latin Quarter, though rather more luxurious than most: much more so than mine, for example. To begin with, she had a carpet, her private property, a sober-hued Brussels carpet, that covered almost the entire floor; then she had four chairs, each practicable and reasonably fresh-looking; her bed was enriched by a counterpane of crimson silk, and crimson too were the hangings over it. The walls were decorated in the prevailing style of her class and epoch, with tambourines, toy trumpets, empty bonbon boxes, and so forth, hung from tin-tacks. But the chief impression that you got of the room was one of cleanliness and order: Zizi, still for all slips of hers, was French.

“How very neat it is, how exquisitely neat,” Elinor murmured, in evident surprise.

Zizi smiled complacently,—with what they call proper pride. “Pas mal, hein? Asses chic, eh?” she questioned, whilst her eyes snapped triumphantly.

“Yes,” Elinor admitted, “it is very nice, but—it looks due north.”

And she proceeded to develop her favourite hygienic thesis, to the effect that no one could keep well who lived in a room that had no sun, the application being that Zizi must change her quarters. To-morrow, Monday, she must find a room that really did “give to the noon;” and at three o’clock we would meet her at the Vachette, and go with her to inspect it. Of course we were to pay the rent.

“My dear Elinor,” I said, when we had taken leave of Zizi, “I am sorry to discourage you, but your benevolent schemes will come to nothing. She won’t change her lodgings, and she won’t change her mode of life. We would much better have given her a little ready cash, and got rid of her. An endeavour to be respectable, if only ad interim as it were, would weary her too much. You rashly promised to see that she wanted for nothing. Can you see that she has plenty of excitement?—which is the breath of her nostrils. To-morrow she will draw back; she will tell you that on the whole she finds she can’t accept your bigger offer, and will renew her request for fifty francs.”

“If I didn’t know you weren’t, I should think you were a perfectly soulless cynic,” was Elinor’s rejoinder.

But, cynic or no cynic, I was right. Elinor, in agreeing to meet Zizi at Vachettes on the morrow, had forgotten a previous engagement, which she remembered afterwards; so I went to the rendezvous alone, charged, however, with full powers to act as I might deem best. Zizi was a quarter-hour late, but she didn’t mind that, apparently; at any rate she vouchsafed no apology for having kept me waiting. She made haste to let me know that she couldn’t possibly change her lodgings; she hadn’t even looked for others: her mother wouldn’t hear of it, for one thing; and then—her friends? They all have mothers, somehow or other, though the notion seems incongruous: yet I suppose it’s only natural. Zizi’s was a purple-faced old sage femme from the purlieus of ‘Montmartre. She had taken counsel with her mother, she said, and her mother wouldn’t hear of her changing her abode. And then—her friends? When they came to see her, and found that she had moved, they would be displeased; they wouldn’t follow her up. Business is business, after all, but in our youth we were taught that friendship isn’t. Anyhow, Zizi foresaw herself quite friendless if she moved. “But my room is very well. If you and Madame want to support me, why not support me there?”

I echoed, rather feebly perhaps, Elinor’s lecture on the advantages of sunlight; and in any case, I told her, desirous as Madame and I were to “support her,” we positively declined to permit ourselves that indulgence, unless she took a sunny room: what we really wished was to help her to get well; we were persuaded that she couldn’t get well in a northern aspect; and we had no sort of eagerness to throw our money from the windows. It was pretty clear to me that she had begun to distrust our motives: such unaccustomed kindness, such reckless extravagance, bore on their face a suspicious look.

“Et cette dame?” she queried. “Cette anglaise? Qu est-ce qu’elle me veut? Elle est ta maÎtresse, hein? Femme mariÉe, eh? Et toi, avec ton petit air Sainte-Nitouche, va! I’ll tell you what: give me some money, fifty francs, to buy medicines, to pay a doctor. Come on! Fifty francs—it isn’t much.”

“Yes, it is, my dear,” I retorted. “It’s a jolly lot, as you know very well. But still, if you prefer the part, when you might have the whole, that is your affair; and so I’m going to give it to you. Only, mind, this will begin and end the whole transaction. We give you fifty francs, but we will never give you another penny.” Then I smuggled a fifty-franc note into her pretty little hand,—smuggled it, so that the waiters and the other consommateurs shouldn’t see.

But Zizi was troubled by no such false shame. She smoothed the note out, and held it up to the light, scrutinising it rigorously. Having satisfied herself that it wasn’t a counterfeit, she crammed it into a small silver purse, closed the purse with a snap, and buried it in an occult female pocket. At last she turned her face towards mine, and said, “T’es bon, toi. That will bring you luck. Kiss me.” I suggested that the cafÉ was rather too public a place for kissing. The fifty-franc note radiated its genial warmth throughout her small frame, and she quite “chippered up,” and laughed and chatted with me very pleasantly. “Why do you never come to see me,—since we live in the same house?” she was good enough to ask. And she tried to pump me, in a naughty insinuating way, about Elinor, her benefactress.

But Zizi was launched upon her descent into Avernus. Her cough got worse and worse; her cheeks grew hollow, her whole face dragged-looking; her figure lost its elasticity. She took to rouge and powder, and introduced falsetto notes into her toilet. With her failing health, her friends began to fail her too: coughs and fevers and eyes unnaturally bright are disturbing elements, and put a strain on friendship. She had to seek for new ones, and was to be met with a good deal in the Boulevards. Whenever she spied Elinor and me on her horizon, she bore down upon us, and begged for money: and she was always spying us, always turning up; it seemed as if she must have dogged our footsteps. Thus you cast your bread upon the waters, and it comes back to you in the fulness of time. She was French, as I have remarked before: but she showed no discretion, and no respect for places or occasions. Not infrequently, therefore, her familiar hailings of us were embarrassing. By and by she acquired a light-hearted habit of entering the Vachette, ordering what she would, and leaving it to be scored to my account; and I had to remonstrate. At last she found out Elinor’s address, and called upon her. But Elinor was going to London the next day; so nothing came of that. This was in December; and early in the same month Zizi began to keep her room. She was probably very ill; she coughed perpetually. She coughed a good deal when it wasn’t necessary, and only racked without relieving her poor chest, to say nothing of her neighbours’ nerves. I used to urge her to control her cough, not to cough when she could help it; but self-control of any sort was beyond her tradition; and she would always cough at the slightest impulse. Once in a great while, if she was a little better, and the weather favoured, she would put on her rouge and her finery, and go out,—to “pÉcher À la ligne,” as she expressed it. Then, on her re-entrance, I would hear forlorn attempts at song and laughter, which would inevitably end in long, pitiful fits of coughing.

And now it is all over; Zizi is dead; and I am as much shocked as if the event were inconsequent and unexpected, as if she hadn’t been coughing her life out steadily these three months past. Ah, well, the difficulty is to reconcile one’s idea of Zizi with anything not vain and hollow and make-believe, with anything natural and sincere; and death is so hideously natural, so horribly sincere. For the first time since her birth, I dare say, she has done a sincere thing, a real thing,—she has died!