To imagine such a thing made me a choking in my throat, and I left the bureau in some sickness.

This increased so much (as I approached the Madeleine, where I wished to mount an omnibus) that I entered a restaurant and drank a small glass of cognac.

Then I called for writing-papers and wrote to the good Mother Superior and my dear little nieces at their convent.

I enclosed two hundred and fifty francs, which sum I had fallen behind in my payments for their education and sustenance, and I felt a moment's happiness that at least for a while I need not fear that my poor brother's orphans might become objects of charity--a fear which, accompanied by my own hunger, had led me to become the joke of the boulevards.
Feeling rich with my remaining fifty francs, I ordered the waiter to bring me a goulasch and a carafe of blond beer, after the consummation of which I spent an hour in the reading of a newspaper.

Can it be credited that the journal of my perusement was the one which may be called the North-American paper of the aristocracies of Europe?
Also, it contains some names of the people of the United States at the hotels and elsewhere.
How eagerly I scanned those singular columns! Shall I confess to what purpose?
I read the long lists of uncontinental names over and over, but I lingered not at all upon those like "Muriel," "Hermione," "Violet," and "Sibyl," nor over "Balthurst," "Skeffington-Sligo," and "Covering-Legge"; no, my search was for the Sadies and Mamies, the Thompsons, Van Dusens, and Bradys.