Page:Solo (1924).pdf/326

 "I walked home, diametrically across Paris, still keyed up as an effect of the brightness and friendliness of the Shrotons, but mellowed by having acted as Father Confessor in a dingy studio; and I pondered many things.

"Earlier in the evening I had stopped at the Rotonde to drink coffee, and repelled the overtures of a Swedish cinema actress trying to ape the make-up and manner of French tarts—why, God knows! And on my long journey home I had stopped in the Rue St. Marc to have an omelet and a cup of coffee beside a mixed group of thieves, gaming crooks, journalists, public ladies including Suzy, and other noctambules, where the patronne gives me credit and relates the peripéties with which patronnes of blackguardly resorts have to contend.

"The point, is, I don't know to which category I, by nature, belong: to the facetious, aristocratic and opulent, or the starkly, grimly, obstacle-ridden idealistic. I like good cheer at a scintillating table surrounded by the socially and sartorially impeccable, the playfully-minded leisure class—I shouldn't, but I do. Their point of view is unaccountably familiar and natural to me. I disapprove of the Bolshevist fellow's shallowness. I disapprove even of Karl Zurschmiede's griminess, of his cluttered floor, of his uncomplaining acceptance of squalor. Yet I instantly respond, for, as he would modestly say of a well-drawn sketch,  ' Il y a du caractère dedans, '  and I know I would forego many a good dinner, many a reunion with old acquaintances who show me off at my most amiable, in the interest of the principle that makes the young Swiss, for instance, struggle on in the hope of being able one day to paint a Christ that won't look like half-melted putty."

"Night café, rue St. Marc, 4 a.m., July 8, 1922."

You remember that woman who was sitting in your