QUITE ALONE.

BOOK THE FIRST: CHILDHOOD.

CHAPTER XXVI. THE ONLY CITY OF THE WORLD
WORTH LIVING IN.

PARIS, dear, delightful, inimitable, unrivalled
Paris, city of delights, city of art, and taste, and
luxury; of fashion, and elegance, and wit. Paris,
unapproached among earth's most delicious
haunts. Paris, queen of the world. Paris, the
only city of the world worth living in.

Certainly. This is the refrain to a very old
song. You and I, and everybody else, have been
singing it, always heartily, and with a kind of
sincerity, never ad nauseam, ever since per railway
or per diligence we first set foot in Lutetia
The Beloved. There is no need to renew in mature
age the vaccination we have had in our youth.
The Paris virus, once imbibed, is not to be eradicated.

Of course Paris is enchanting. Everybody
knows it; everybody says it. One may toil and
grow rich and die in London; one may drag on
an existence at Vienna, vegetate at Brussels,
prowl through the year at Florence, be bored at
Rome, hipped at Venice, terrified at St. Petersburg,
stupified at Berlin, excited at New York,
soothed at Boston, deluded at Dublin, intoxicated
at Edinburgh, astonished at Seville, amused at
Milan, occupied at Amsterdam, fatigued at
Naples, absorbed at Manchester, salted at
Liverpool, cured at Brighton, and killed at New
Orleans; but if one wants to live, to see life, to
enjoy life, to make the most of life, there is
clearly no place in the world for man or woman
but Paris.

This is an assertion scarcely worth arguing
upon. Opinions are unanimous. Of course there
are no bonnets in the world worth the Paris
bonnets. The Boulevards are unequalled among
streets. Nobody knows how to cook, out of the
Palais Royal. No pictures worth looking at are
to be seen out of the Louvre, except, indeed, those
at the Luxembourg. Why pursue a theme so trite?
While I, a single Englishman, am dully sounding
the praises of Paris, fifty thousand Germans,
Italians, Swedes, Russians, Poles, Czechs, Moldo-
Wallachs, Montenegrins, Magyars, and Mussulmans,
are crying out that Parisian life is the life
of lives, and that the only city worth living in is
Paris.

Lily Floris lived in Paris for seven years.
Until she was fifteen years of age, she never
passed that gloomy porte cochère in the outer
wall of the Pension Marcassin. It was her
penitentiary, her prison-house; and a terrible one it
was.

There was a vast playground; and in it, when
she was not under punishment, she was privileged
to walk. Beyond its precincts she never stirred.
She never went home for the holidays. The
vacations at the Pension Marcassin were three
days from the Jour de l'An, the first of January,
to the fourth—a week at Easter—a month from
the first of August to the second of September.
These holidays came and went for seven years,
but she remained immured. She had seven years'
penal servitude. When the girls were away,
long tasks were set her, and these she learnt and
wrote, and repeated or submitted to Mademoiselle
Marcassin, or, in her absence, to the governess
left in charge. It was a dreary probation, and
she was Quite Alone.

Lonelier when, at the end of the second year
of her captivity, Polly Marygold took her departure.
The girl could not refrain from sundry
ebullitions of joy at her deliverance from a school
of which she was weary, and from a school-
mistress whom she hated, but she was nevertheless
unfeignedly sorry to leave Lily.

"It's like deserting you in a desert island, my
darling," she cried, as she kissed her and kissed
her again, on the well-remembered morning of her
going away; "or, rather, it's like leaving you in
a savage country full of cannibals. For cannibals
they are here, and nothing else."

"But you will write to me, Polly? You will,
won't you, my dear?" poor Lily replied, twining
herself round the neck of the only friend but
one she had ever had in the world. "Oh! say
that you will write to me, that you will come and
see me, or I shall break my heart. I am so very
very lonely."

"I know you are, my pet. I wish to goodness
you were coming with me. Who knows!
Perhaps they'll turn you out as a governess
some of these days. Although," she continued,
with a profoundly sagacious look, "my own
opinion is, that you are heiress to immense
estates and vast wealth, in England, and that