“I don’t know, yet.”
“Well, I don’t know,—but I hope and trust so. I like you. You’ve got something they don’t have—these American girls,—softness and strength, too. I imagine you’ve never been out of America.”
“I—I have.”
“With two other girls and a chaperon, doing Europe, and staying at all the hotels doped up for tourist consumption.”
Nancy was constrained to answer with a smile.
“You don’t like America very much,” she said presently.
“I like it for itself, but I loathe it—for myself. My way of living here is all wrong. I can’t get to bed in this confounded city. I can’t get enough to eat.”
“Oh! can’t you?” Nancy cried.
“In Paris, or any town where there is a café life one naturally gets fed. The technique of living is taken care of much better over there. Your concierge serves you a nourishing breakfast as a matter of course. When you’ve done your morning’s work you go to your favorite café—not with the one object in life—to cram a Châteaubriand down your dry and resisting throat because he who labors must live,—but to see your friends, to read your daily journals, to write your letters, and do it incidentally in the open air while some diplomat of a waiter serves you with food that assuages the palate, 64 without insulting your mood. That’s what I like about the little restaurant in the court there. It’s out-of-doors, and you may stay there without feeling your table is in requisition for the next man. It’s a very polite little place.”