He wandered much, in Europe and Asia, but always he came back to the flat he kept in Zenith. It was so filled with his collections of lace, wrought-iron keys, and editions of Oscar Wilde, that there was scarcely room for his genuine Russian samovar and his bed with a cover of black and gold. He spent much of his time in Zenith in denouncing the tradesmen who manufactured soap and motor cars instead of collecting lace, and in checking up his profitable holdings in soap and motor cars. He got up the first exhibition of Slavic embroidery in the state, he read poetry aloud, and he talked a good deal about starting a new magazine of the new poetry and the new prose.
Whenever Sam had met Jerry Watts in Zenith, he had grumbled to Fran on the way home, “Why the devil did they invite that white grub? He makes me sick!” But as Jerry had invariably told Fran in three languages that she was the loveliest lady in town, she turned on Sam with “Oh, of course! Just because Jerry is really cultured, because he has brains enough to cultivate a fine leisure instead of grubbing in a dirty office, all you noble captains of industry look down on him as a dray-horse might look down on a fine racehorse!”
She even had Jerry for dinner. In fact, Sam had been led to hate Jerry with considerable heartiness.
But in the oppressive strangeness of Paris, any familiar face would have been exciting, and for five minutes Sam believed that he was glad to see Jerry Watts.
Jerry sat down; he giggled, “I told you you’d escape from that dreadful Middlewest, Fran, and come to a civilized country! Don’t you just adore the Novgorod? Such darling roughnecks! Such delectable poses! Oh, my dears, I heard the best one here last evening! Tommy Troizka—he’s the dearest Finn boy, and a great watercolorist, speaks English perfectly, oh, too simply divinely, and Tommy said, ‘The trouble with your American intelligentsia is that most of you don’t know how to tell a gent when you see him!’ Isn’t that precious! Oh, you’ll adore being here in Paris! Don’t you, Dodsworth?”
“Yeah, great town,” said Sam.
“Have you been to the Lion d’Or yet?”
“Oh yes,” said Fran.
“Have you tried the rognons de la maison at Emil’s?”
“Yes.”
“And of course you’ve been to the L’Ane Rouge and the Rendezvous des Mariniers?”
“Yes.”
“And the Chemise Sale?”
“No, I don’t think—”
“You haven’t been to the Chemise Sale? Oh, Fran! Why, good Heavens! Don’t you realize that the Chemise Sale is the duckiest little restaurant in Paris?”
Fran was annoyed.
It was not that she was given to ducky little restaurants or any other phase of synthetic Bohemianism, but that any other citizen of Zenith should know more about Paris than she was intolerable. She glared slightly when Jerry seized his advantage and laid down the rule that it was vulgar to go to Versailles but that they must see the exhibition of the Prismatic Internists. Sam felt patiently that she would presently despatch Jerry. Yet she looked pleased when Jerry piped:
“Have you met Endicott Everett Atkins? He’s coming to tea at my place next Saturday afternoon—I have such a dusky little studio on the Rue des Petits-Champs. You and your husband must come.”
“We’ll be glad to,” said Fran, to Sam’s considerable discouragement.
Sam grunted, in the taxicab, “What do you want to go there for? Who’s Endicott Everett Atkins? Sounds like a business college yell. He another lily like Watts?”
“No, he really is somebody. Dean of the American literary colony here—writes about French novelists and Austrian peasant furniture and Correggio and English hunting and Heaven knows what all.”
“But I don’t have to learn about peasant furniture, too, do I?” Sam said hopefully.
Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins was reputed to resemble Henry James. He had the massive and rather bald head, the portly dignity. He spoke—and he spoke a good deal—in a measured voice, and he had a small bright wife who was believed to adore him. He also was blessed, and furthered in his critical pursuits, by having no sense of humor whatever, though he knew so many sparkling anecdotes that one did not suspect it for hours. He came from South Biddlesford, Connecticut, and his father, to whom he often referred as “that dear and so classical a bibliophile,” had been an excellent hat-manufacturer. He owned a real house in Paris, with an upstairs and down, and he spoke chummily of the Ambassador.
He did actually, against any expectation, keep his promise and appear at the tea in Mr. Jerry Watts’s studio—an apartment with a scarlet-fever of Spanish altar-cloths, embroidered copes, and Mandarin robes. The only apparent reason for calling it a studio was that it had a north window, and that Mr. Jerry Watts naturally would call it a studio. “I just can’t make love except by a north light!” he nickered to Fran.
On the refectory table was a small teapot, a small plate of limp cakes, and an enormous bowl of punch. After everyone had had three glasses of the punch, the conversation became very agitated. There were massed about the table, screaming, some thirty people. Sam never remembered any of them, save Endicott Everett Atkins. The rest seemed to him as indistinguishable as separate mosquitoes in a swarm, and rather noisier. But there was nothing noisy about Mr. Endicott Everett Atkins. He had so developed poise, an appalling, reproving, Christian Science sort of poise, that Sam felt toward him as he once had toward the professor of Greek drama at Yale.
Mr. Atkins could purr at the thought of particularly pleasant and beautiful things—a Greek coin, a Javanese dancing girl, a check from his publisher—but in crowds he stood calm and expansive as an observation balloon in windless air. In the quietest corner of the apartment he held forth on the Italian Renaissance, the superiority of Parliament to Congress, the future of Anglo-Catholicism, the letters of Horace Walpole, and
