I was delighted with everything.  In imagination I beheld my balcony already blooming with roses, and my shelves laden with books.  I admired the white and gold chairs with all my heart, and saw myself reflected in half a dozen mirrors at once with an innocent pride of ownership which can only be appreciated by those who have tasted the supreme luxury of going into chambers for the first time.

“Shall I conclude for Monsieur at twenty francs a week?” murmured the sagacious Brunet.

“Of course,” said I, laying the first week’s rent upon the table.

And so the thing was done, and, brimful of satisfaction, I went off to the hotel for my luggage, and moved in immediately.

* * * * *

CHAPTER XII.

BROADCLOTH AND CIVILIZATION.

Allowing for my inexperience in the use of the language, I prospered better than I had expected, and found, to my satisfaction, that I was by no means behind my French fellow-students in medical knowledge.  I passed through my preliminary examination with credit, and although Dr. Cheron was careful not to praise me too soon, I had reason to believe that he was satisfied with my progress.  My life, indeed, was now wholly given up to my work.  My country-breeding had made me timid, and the necessity for speaking a foreign tongue served only to increase my natural reserve; so that although I lived and studied day after day in the society of some two or three hundred young men, I yet lived as solitary a life as Robinson Crusoe in his island.  No one sought to know me.  No one took a liking for me.  Gay, noisy, chattering fellows that they were, they passed me by for a “dull and muddy-pated rogue;” voted me uncompanionable when I was only shy; and, doubtless, quoted me to each other as a rare specimen of the silent Englishman.  I lived, too, quite out of the students’ colony.  To me the Quartier Latin (except as I went to and fro between the Hotel Dieu and the Ecole de Medicine) was a land unknown; and the student’s life—­that wonderful Vie de Boheme which furnishes forth half the fiction of the Paris press—­a condition of being, about which I had never even heard.  What wonder, then, that I never arrived at Dr. Cheron’s door five minutes behind time, never missed a lecture, never forgot an appointment?  What wonder that, after dropping moodily into one or two of the theatres, I settled down quite quietly in my lodgings; gave up my days to study; sauntered about the lighted alleys of the Champs Elysees in the sweet spring evenings, and, going home betimes, spent an hour or two with my books, and kept almost as early hours as in my father’s house at Saxonholme?