The speaker is drawn to a man she knows only through a portrait, whose artist is unknown and whose subject is named David Nichols. She imagines his ghost following her around Paris: a slim shadow in Montmartre, a rose falling at her feet in Pigalle, murmured compliments in terrible French, a handkerchief waving from the Arc de Triomphe. Whether these are real events or her own fancy, the poem never says, and that playful uncertainty is part of its charm.
The tone is affectionate, flirtatious, and a little wistful. She talks to him as if he were alive, wanting to touch his hair and trace his nose, and she keeps coming back to his smile and the gleam in his eye. Her remark that she is "glad" he died in Paris is odd but tender: Vermont, she feels, was too small for his flair. The mood is light and dreamy, with a quiet ache underneath for someone she can never meet.