Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/207

 clothes were of the best, and who looked pleasantly brainless enough to be the complement of Kant himself. Instead of being awe-struck by the words of wisdom which must have been issuing from the mouth of the sage, the young man picked them up and tossed them back with a charming, perverse flippancy.

Youth, Grover was thinking, has the right to be rude; it's so indispensable. All the more right in that youth is too young to know how to drive a bargain. When its clothes are bought for it, it doesn't see that its soul is being taxed on the side.

"My best friend," Marthe was telling him, "is an old old man,—older than that one—a Vicomte. He comes here to see me three or four times a year. He wants nothing of me at all—he has never wanted anything—I have never seen him outside this room. He says it is my hair he comes to see. He makes me take off my hat so that he may stroke it. Everybody in the room giggles, but he doesn't notice. Then he weeps a little and gives me heaps of money, and goes away. And I know he will come back."

"Have you no girl friends?"

Marthe shrugged her shoulders, thereby dismissing her own sex.

"I have a friend who comes Fridays. It's her day off. She is an English Miss in a rich family. She hopes to reform me," and Marthe burst into a rippling laugh. She was not scornful of the good Miss's futile zeal, but genuinely appreciative of its humorous