The pitiful sum represented to the artist two months of his meager salary.

Here was absinthe unlimited, a little roulette, a new frock for Madame Frangipanni, perhaps even a dress coat for himself.
"How old do you think Alixe is ?" unsteadily began the artist.
"I should say about twenty-five," gallantly replied the Major.
"We will premise that she is thirty-three," confidently began the musician, "or even thirty-five.

When I was a young fool at Warsaw, eighteen years old," he babbled.

"I was the local prodigy.

My first essays in public were, of course, concerts, and I was soon the vogue.
And, later, asked as an artistic guest to the chateaux of the nobility in Poland, Kowno, Vitebsk, Wilna, Minsk, Grodno and Volhynia.