passions,” said the Baron, “Americans and his pictures. You Americans are making astonishing—I may say appalling—inroads in Germany; your ideas are getting even into the heads of our women, our girls. I don’t like it; I don’t like it. It’s breeding a race of thinking women. I can’t endure a thinking woman. You can’t imagine what I’m suffering just now through Her Serene Highness; but no matter. Your[13] terrible democratic ideas of disrespect for tradition, for institutions, for restraints, are slipping about even in the palaces of our kings. His Royal Highness—the story goes that he was in love with one of your beautiful countrywomen and that she refused to marry him; she did marry his brother, Duke Wolfgang—morganatically, of course. It would be impossible for one of the house of Traubenheim to marry a commoner in the regular way. Your American invasion hasn’t extended that far—”

[13]

“And the pictures?” interrupted Grafton, impatient of the digression.

“Ah—yes—there His Royal Highness has a high enthusiasm, a noble passion. He is positively mad about Rembrandts. He has a notable collection of them, and is always trying to add to it.”

[14]Grafton’s eyes dropped; he feared that this simple old Zweitenbourgian might read his thoughts. “Rembrandts?” he said. “That interests me. I have the same craze in a small way.” And he drew the Baron on. He learned that a Rembrandt filled the Grand Duke with the same burning longing for possession with which his craze, the spurious Velasquez, was now filling him. He began to see victory. He cabled his Chicago agent to send him forthwith, in care of Candace Brothers, his two examples of Rembrandt’s early work. When he was a boy, travelling about with his father, he had found them in an obscure shop in Leyden. They now interested him little except as reminders of an early triumph. But to a collector of Rembrandts they would be treasures.

[14]

[15]A few days after sending the cable he went in the morning with Mrs. Campbell to Paquin’s—Mrs. Campbell was at Paris for her annual shopping. She was to be fitted for six dresses, she explained, and that meant an hour—perhaps two or three hours. But Grafton was so attracted by the scene that he said he would wait, at least until he was tired. He seated himself on the sofa against the wall, near the door. It was in line with the passage-way into which the fitting-salons open.

[15]

The general 

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