The Pension Beaurepas

and old maids, and to maintain the balance of the sexes there were only an old Frenchman and a young American. It hardly made the matter easier that the old Frenchman came from Lausanne. He

all at the Pension Beaurepas. Geneva was, after all, more like Paris, and at a Genevese boarding-house there was sure to be plenty of Americans with whom one could talk about the French metro

I found a new-comer, a tall gentleman in a high black hat, whom I immediately recognised as a compatriot. I had often seen him, or his equivalent, in the hotel parlours of my native land. He apparently supposed himself to be at the present moment in a hotel parlour; his hat was on his head, or, rather, half off it-pushed back from his forehead, and rather suspended than poised. He stood before a table on which old newspapers were scattered, one of which he had

aid, "to be the pa

ed, "I believe

king-glass. "Well," he said, "I suppose it's natural a small country should hav

very much bored, and-I don't know why-I immediately began to feel sorry for him. He was not at all a picturesque personage; he looked like a jaded, faded man of business. But after a little he came into the garden and began to stroll about; and then his restless, unoccupied carriage, a

breakfast of theirs c

-the little breakfast

ld live to see the tim

ut a man's glad to do

observed, "I fin

a dry, deliberate, kind- looking eye. "Y

very much," I a

have you

ean in th

It seems to me pretty

his house only a

ay, from what you have s

see all there is immedi

'm afraid my two ladies

"And Madame Beaurepas is a charming

my friend repeat

inquired the terms. But he appeared not to have heard me; he sat there, c

tes, sir?" he presently dema

; and I mentioned the

or English. I'm from the United States myself

there have sometimes been. T

ty. I think when it's superior there's nothing comes up to it. I'v

ted, and I inquired of my friend w

us long," he said, "bu

re fourteen wee

lling for plea

ked at me-looked at me so long in silence

. "No, sir," he repeated, af

something so solemn in his tone t

to look at me. "I'm travelling," he said, at last, "to pl

you abroad fo

y were so confoundedly muddled t

best thing," I v

't know enough to cure me, and that's the way they thought they would get round i

the inefficiency of doctors, and asked

p," he said, a

noying. I suppose y

I took no inter

u both eat and s

t sit still. I couldn't walk from my house to the cars-an

a holiday,

ery smart of them. I had been paying strict a

ve never had a holiday?"

a little. "Sundays

hen, you were

oftly, deliberately. "Well, sir, perhaps you are not aware that business in the United States is not what it was a short time since. Business interests are very insecure. There seems to be a general falling- off. Different parties offer different explanations of the fact, but so far as I am aware none of their observations have set things going again." I ingeniously intimated that if business

slightly illogic

n fire. My firm is not doing the business it was; it's like a sick child, it requires nursing. What I wanted the doctors to do was to fix me up, so that I could go on at home. I'd have taken

man differences, that I quite forgot his seniority, and found myself offering him paternal I advice. "Don't think about all that," said I. "Simply enjoy yourself, amuse yourself

oments, and I thought he was going to say, "You are very young