He raised his companion's hand to his lips and drew her arm through his.
"Come," he cried, "to the streets! We will take our coffee from the stall of Madame Huber."
CHAPTER XIV
THE MORNING AFTER
Kendricks and Julien drove down from the hill in a small open victoria. The sun had risen, but here and there were traces of a fading twilight. A faint mauve glow hung over the sleeping streets. The sunlight as yet was faint and the morning breeze chilly. As they passed down the long hill, tired-looking waiters were closing up the night cafés. Bedraggled revelers crept along the pavements with weary footsteps.
With every yard of their progression, the meeting between the two extremes of life seemed to become more apparent. The children of the night—the weary, unwholesome products of dissipation, rubbed shoulders with the children of the morning—girls, hatless, in simple clothes, walking with brisk footsteps to their work; market women, brown-cheeked and hearty, setting out their wares upon the stalls; the youth of Paris, blithe and strenuous, walking light-footed to the region of warehouses and factories. Julien and Kendricks looked out upon the little scene with interest. Both had been sleepy when they had left the café, but there was something stimulating in the sight of this thin but constant stream of people. Kendricks sat up and began to talk.
"Julien," he declared, "this Paris never alters. It's a queer little world and a rotten one. We are here just at the ebbing of the tide. Don't you feel the hatefulness of it—the thin-blooded scream for pleasure which needs the lash of these painted women, these gaudy cafés, this yellow wine all the time? My God! and they call it pleasure! Look at these people going to their work, Julien. There's where the red blood flows. They're the people with the taste of life between their teeth. Can't you see them at their pleasures—see them sitting in a beer-garden with a girl and a band, their week's money in their pocket, and the knowledge that they've earned it? Perhaps sometimes they look up the hill and wonder at the craze for it all. Did you see the stream coming up to-night—automobiles, victorias, carriages of every sort; pale-faced men who had lunched too well, dined too well, flogging their tired systems in the craze for more excitement, more pleasure; eating at an unwholesome hour, smoking sickly cigarettes, kissing rouged lips, listening to the false music of that hard laughter? Look at those girls arm in arm, off to their little milliner's shop. Hear them laugh! You don't hear anything like that, Julien, on the top of the hill."
"Of course," Julien remarked, stifling a yawn, "if you've come to Paris to be moral—"
"Not I!" Kendricks broke in roughly. "Bless you, I'm one of the worst.
A wild night in Paris calls me even now from any part of the world. But
Lord, what fools we are! And, Julien, we get worse. It's the old people
who keep these places going."
"The older we get," Julien replied, "the harder we have to struggle for our joys."