Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/107

 from a chair on a sidewalk cafe on the Boulevard du Montparnasse. Having been gently warned by Geoffrey Saint against the Dome and the Rotonde, he had of course made a bee-line for them, and a little timidly taken his place in the throng sipping apéritifs in the late afternoon. Every language smote his ear. Before his eyes was a jumble of types: indigent Russians and Roumanians, clumsy but affluent Danes; Englishmen wearing their dégagé air with a difference, a little subdued by the Frenchness of it all; and several groups of Americans, some quiet and serious who looked as though they were thoroughly bored with their surroundings but had been there too long to venture home, and some who were wearing corduroy jackets and bérets and doing as many other things as possible that you couldn't do in Kansas. But whatever they did, the measure of their triumph was indicated by their appearance; for in Kansas you certainly couldn't look like that,—not with impunity. More self-assertive even than these artists was a group of three American girls who, though decidedly the worse for wear, would have passed muster in a Ziegfeld chorus and probably had. With them were some American sailors, pink and robust, and, for all their bravado, slightly embarrassed. One of them, a giant, was eating ice-cream. They seemed torn between a desire to take the girls at their very liberal word and a desire to respect them, for while their physical insolence was even more marked than that of the average street girl of New