“They are always so,” he said.
“I envy them.... But it couldn’t happen in America, could it? Imagine this in Cleveland or Detroit. Why, everybody would be put out by the management, or the police would be called in! And why?... I’m learning a lot since I came to France.... There’s something in the very air here. One could do things never dreamed of at home.... I don’t know what it is, but that’s the way I feel. Maybe it is the freedom from restraint, maybe it’s the example, maybe it is that the war is so tremendous that nothing a single individual can do is of the least importance.... But the feeling is there. Other girls have told me the same thing.”
“Paris does get you,” said Ken.
“Things don’t seem to matter,” she said, thoughtfully. “It’s like being in a different world where none of the old rules hold good.... I can’t imagine myself talking like this or feeling like this. I couldn’t have a month ago.... I think,” she said, with a little laugh, “that I shall have to keep my head very level.”
Ken was astonished. So the thing was getting Maude Knox, too! She saw a difference, felt a difference, felt the challenge of a difference! “It gets you.... It gets you,” he said, helplessly.
“Sometimes I have a feeling that I’d like to throw up the whole show and live here forever—be a lotus-eater,” she said, with more seriousness. “If I were a man—”
“Yes?”
She shrugged her shoulders. “What’s the use?... But I’ll say this—I’m never going to see things with the same eyes again. I think I’ll be able to understand that there are two sides to a story.”
This was the same Maude Knox he had known on the vessel crossing the ocean—a Maude Knox who quite typified his ideas of the nice American girl, the sheltered, protected, almost prudish creature of his experience! She had traveled far—and yet she was not less nice because she had seen more of the life that inhabits the planet, nor because she had acquired a certain tolerance for manners and customs that were impossible for herself. It seemed as if she were passing through much the same mental conflict as himself. Perhaps it was not so pronounced with her because her experiences had not been so pronounced. But she seemed to have reached a surer conclusion than he. However, she had never had his mother. Her inheritances were different, and her upbringing by her philosopher father had, perhaps, made it possible for her to progress more rapidly in understanding and clear seeing than himself.
“For instance,” she said, “if I had met you with that little French girl a month ago I should probably have cut you.... Especially when you wore such a guilty look....”