Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/106

 heen either naive or vulgar. Here in Paris nothing was naive, and though many things might be evil, there were few that were vulgar. Something is happening to me already, he reflected, as the song broke off and gave place to an energetic oath—"Nom d'un nom!" the carpet-beater having collided with something solid, apparently a high-voiced chambermaid,—and when. I go back to America, if ever I do, it will be as a man who is Gallic, a man with an interpretative way of looking at the commonplace, a man with a waistcoat pocketful of ironic little pills that will render life less indigestible, a man—with a haunting twist in his rhythm! Half a bar left out here and there to break the obvious and eternal tum-tum, tum-tum. A man "comme ces musiciens qui jouent faux par raffinement." Life in America is written in strict four-four time in the key of Major: anything subtler than that we, to use our own immortal phrase, have to be educated up to, God help us. As if you could be educated up to fine sensibilities! Here people were born with them, even the boys who beat carpets. Here people caught subtleties on the wing and recognized the myriad shades between the black and white which don't exist in nature but which Americans, with their incurable belief in hundred percentism, were forever postulating as realities. Where, thought Grover, is my patriotism?

He wondered all the more later in the day when he watched the antics of a number of his compatriots