Each of these castes is subdivided according to one’s preference for smart society or society so lofty that it need not be smart, society given to low bars and earnest drinking, the society of business exploitation, or that most important society of plain loafing. Happy is he who can cleave utterly to one of these cliques; he can find a group of fellow zealots and, drinking or shopping or being artistic, be surrounded with gloriously logrolling comrades.
But Sam Dodsworth was unfortunate, for his wife panted to combine smartness with an attention to Art, while he himself preferred business and the low bars.
For all of Fran’s superiority to “sightseeing,” they were at first lonely in Paris, and Sam was able to drag her to all the places mentioned in the guidebooks. They danced at Zelli’s; they went up the Eiffel Tower and she came near to being sick in corners; thrice they went to the Louvre; and once he cajoled her into the New York Bar for a whisky and soda and spirited conversation with an unknown man about skiing and the Bronx. She showed even more zest than he in finding new small restaurants—he would have been content to return every night to the places in which he had conquered the waiters and learned the wine-list.
And, curiously, he enjoyed galleries and picture-exhibitions more than she.
Fran had read enough about art; she glanced over the studio magazines monthly, and she knew every gallery on Fifth Avenue. But, to her, painting, like all “culture,” was interesting only as it adorned her socially. In storybooks parroting the Mark Twain tradition, the American wife still marches her husband to galleries from which he tries to sneak away; but in reality Sam’s imagination was far more electrified by blue snow and golden shoulders and dynamic triangles than was Fran’s. Probably he would have balked at the blurs of Impressionism and the jazz mathematics of Cubism, but it chanced that the favorite artist just this minute was one Robinoff, who did interiors pierced with hectic sunshine hurled between the slats of Venetian blinds, or startling sun-rays striking into dusky woodlands, and at these (while Fran impatiently wanted to get on to tea) Sam stared long and contentedly, drawing in his breath as though he smelled the hot sun.
In every phase Fran was as incalculable about “sightseeing” as about liking his business associates. One day she was brazen enough to be discovered with the tourists’ badge, the red Baedeker, unconcealed; the next she wouldn’t even sit with him at a sidewalk café—at the Napolitain or the Closerie-des-Lilas.
“But why not?” he protested. “Best place to see the world go by. Everybody goes to ’em.”
“Smart people don’t.”
“Well, I’m not smart!”
“Well, I am!”
“Then you ought to be smart enough to not care what anybody thinks!”
“Perhaps I am. … But I don’t care to be seen sitting with a lot of trippers in raincoats.”
“But you sat in a café yesterday, and enjoyed it. Don’t you remember the beggar that sang—”
“Exactly! I’ve had enough of it! Oh, if you want to go and yearn over your dear American fellow tourists, by all means go, my dear Samuel! I am going to the Crillon and have a decent tea.”
“And yearn over the dear fellow American tourists that happen to be rich!”
“Is it necessary for you always to quarrel with me because I want to do what I want to do? I’m not keeping you from sitting on your sidewalks. Don’t go to the Crillon! Go to one of your beloved American bars, if you want to, and scrape up acquaintance with a lot of drunken businessmen—”
They compromised on going to the Crillon.
He puzzled over her feeling that it was a duty to keep herself fashionable in the eyes of the choice people who did not know that she existed. He could understand that back in Zenith she might have a good human satisfaction in being more snobbish than the matron across the street, in the ancient sport of “putting it over on the neighbors.” He had been unrighteously pleased when he had seen her better dressed than her dear friend and resented rival, Lucile McKelvey. “Good girl,” he had crowed; “you were the best-dressed wench in the room!”
But why should it matter to Fran that a strange Parisian aristocrat passing in a carriage might some day see them sitting contentedly at a café and arch her brows at them?
He admitted that the serene and classic Place des Vosges with the Carnavalet Museum was perhaps more select than Pat’s Chicago Bar; that caneton pressé might be a more elegant food than corn fritters at the Savannah Grill. “But,” he fretted, “why can’t you enjoy both—as long as you do enjoy ’em? Nobody’s hired us to come here and be stylish! We haven’t got any duty involved! Back home there may have been a law against enjoying ourselves
