"No.The air's full of new ferns.But why Gehane?""You remind me of her, and I'm pretty certain that you also could do your hair in the same two long braids.Given the chance, I can see you developing into some-thing like medievalism and joining the ranks of women who loved greatly."They passed the Plaza with all its windows gleaming, like a giant's house in a fairy tale.
Joan shook her head."No," she said."No.I'm just the last word of this very minute.Everybody in America for a hundred and fifty years has worked to make me.I'm the reward of mighty effort.I'm the dream-child of the pioneers, as far removed from them as the chimney of the highest building ftora the rock on which it's rooted."Palgrave laughed a little."It appears that you did some thinking out there in your country cage.""Thinking! That's all I had to do! I spent a lifetime standing on the hill with the woods behind me trying to catch the music of this street, the sound of this very car, and I thought it all out, every bit of it.""Every bit of what?"
"Life and death and the great hereafter," she said, "principally life.That's why I'm going out to dinner with you instead of going early to bed."The glare of a lamp silvered her profile and the young curve of her bosom.Somewhere, at some time, Palgrave had knelt humbly, with strange anguish and hunger, at the feet of a girl with just that young proud face and those unawakened eyes.The memory of it was like an echo of an echo.
"Why," said Joan, halting for a moment on her way to the steps of the old hotel, "this looks like a picture postcard of a bit of Paris.""Yes, on the other side of the Seine, near the Odeon.Our grandfathers imagined that they were very smart when they stayed here.It's one of the few places in town that has atmosphere.""I like it," said Joan.
The hall was alive with people, laughing and talking, and the walls with the rather bold designs of the posters.A band, which made up in vim and go what it lacked in numbers, was playing a selection from "The Chocolate Soldier." The place was full of the smell of garlic and cigarette smoke and coffee.There was a certain dramatic animation among the waiters, characteristically Latin.Few of the diners wore evening clothes.The walls were refreshingly free from the hideous gold decorations of the average hotel.
Men stared at Joan with undisguised interest and approbation.Her virginity was like the breath of spring in the room.Women looked after Palgrave in the same way.Into that semi-Bohemianism he struck a rather surprising note, like the sudden advent of caviar and champagne upon a table of beer and pickles.
They were given a table near the wall by the window, far too close to other tables for complete comfort.Waiters were required to be gymnasts to slide between them and avoid an accident.Palgrave ordered without any hesitation, like a newspaper man finding his way through a daily paper.
"How do you like it?" he said.
Joan looked about her.Mostly the tables were occupied by a man and a woman, but at a few were four and six of both in equal numbers, and here and there parties of men.At one or two, women with eccentric heads sat together in curious garments which had the appearance of being made at home on the spur of the moment.They smoked between mouthfuls and laughed without restraint.Some of the men wore longish hair and the double tie of those who wish to be mistaken for dramatists.Others affected a poetic disarrangement of collar, and fantastic beards.There were others who had wandered over the border of middle age and who were bald and strangely adipose, with mackerel eyes and unpleasant mouths.They were with young girls, gaudily but shabbily dressed, shopgirls perhaps, or artists' models or stenographers, who in dull and sordid lives grappled any chance to obtain a square meal, even if it had to be accessory to such companionship.The minority of men present was made up of honest, clean, commonplace citizens who were there for a good dinner in surroundings that offered a certain stimulus to the imagination.