“My dear Sam, it’s a matter of keeping one’s self-respect. It’s like the Englishman, all alone in the jungle, who always dresses for dinner.”
“Yes, I’ve read about him! In the first place, he probably didn’t do it, and in the second place, if he did he was a chump! That’s how I’ve always figured it.”
“You would! You couldn’t understand what it meant to him—”
“Well, if all that stood between him and losing his self-respect was a hard-boiled shirtfront, I guess he might as well have let it slide! If I can’t be self-respectful in a flannel shirt, I’m about ready to jump off the dock and—”
“Oh, you simply can’t understand!”
They had never had much time in Zenith for a serious attention to quarreling and being domestically vulgar. All day he had been at the office; most evenings they had seen other people; on Sunday there had been golf and relatives. They had time aplenty now, equally for quarreling and for intimate and adventurous happiness together. One day they wrangled—and endlessly, because they were not quarreling over any one thing in particular but over the differences in their philosophies of life; the next they went off (and sometimes she was simple and gay enough to let him carry sandwiches somewhat mussily in his pocket) to explore the Forest of Fontainebleau, and they laughed as they walked through groves shivering with April.
He was becoming acquainted with her and, sometimes, slightly, with himself.
He saw little enough of Frenchmen outside of hotel-servants, waiters, shopmen, but what he did see of them, what he saw of the surface of French life, puzzled him. Many travelers in like case take out their confusion in resentment, and damn the whole nation as trivial and mad. But there was in Sam a stubborn wish to get in behind any situation that he came across. He was not one to amuse himself by novelties, by making scenes, by collecting curious people, even overmuch by travel, but once he was dragged into something new he wanted to understand it, and he had a touch of humility, a deep and sturdy recognition of his own ignorance, whenever he could not understand.
And he could not understand these Frenchmen.
He watched them in cafés, at the theater, in shops, in trains to Tours and Versailles. How was it that they could sit, not restless, playing dominoes or chattering, over nothing more beguiling than glasses of coffee (and why was it that they drank coffee in glasses, anyway, instead of in cups)?
They liked talking so much. What the deuce did they find to talk about, hour on hour? How could they stand it without something to do?
Why were there so few grassy yards about the houses? How was it that the most respectable old couples, silvery old men and crouched little old women, were willing to be seen at ordinary cafés in the evening, when their counterparts back home considered the saloon, the café, as the final haunt of the abominable? He saw the French people being gracious in shops, beaming on the babies in the Luxembourg Gardens, laughing together as they paraded the streets, and he decided that they were the soul of kindliness. He saw a Frenchman scowl at American barbarians for daring to enter his quarter-filled railway compartment, he heard Fran being atrociously denounced by a recently smiling, buxom, clean, wholesome shop-woman when Fran insisted that she had been overcharged ten centimes for dry-cleaning a pair of gloves, and he decided that the French were rude and mean to a point of hatefulness … and that his Fran showed an enjoyment of squabbling which was a little disturbing to him.
He saw the Louvre, the silks in shops on the Place Vendôme, the trimness of their own apartment at the Grand Universel, and he decided that the French had the best taste in the world. He saw the department stores with their atrocious brass-fretted windows, their displays of fish and fowl and Marquise-in-a-garden chromos, of buffets carved with wooden blobs, of chairs that were even more violently high-colored than they were uncomfortable; he saw, in the haughty Parc Monceau, the imported ruins; he saw intelligent-seeming Frenchmen snickering over smutty postcards and the eternal, unchanging pictures of naked young women in Vie Parisienne and Le Rire; and he decided that the French had no taste whatever.
But behind all his decisions was the decision that Sam Dodsworth would never be anything save bewildered by foreign ways, while Fran might, perhaps, take to them so eagerly that their companionship would be smashed forever.
XIII
Sam was used enough to New York hotels, and he had spent occasional fortnights at summer inns of Northern Michigan, Maine, the Berkshires. But he had never known the existence of the prosperous refugees from life who cling for years to hotels and pensions, who are mothered by chambermaids, fathered by concierges, befriended only by room-waiters—if they find any waiters kind enough and idle enough to be patient with their longing to gossip.
And he did not like it.
He felt as though he were living in an Old People’s Home. The attention of the servants made him feel old; the elevator man infuriated him by placing a hand under his arm to help him out of an elevator which had stopped a whole inch above the floor; the page boy in the lobby infuriated him by spinning the revolving door—and usually spinning it so artfully that one blade just missed Sam’s nose; the head waiter infuriated him by inquiring, as though Sam had never heard of menus, “A little soup this evening, Mr. Samuels?” and most of all he was infuriated by the room-waiters who were each morning astonished that he should desire eggs in addition to his Continental Breakfast, who fussed over knives and forks, who pushed up chairs and snatched away the pleasant litter of newspapers, and who held out his napkin as though
