“No, but it would be natural.”
“Yes, but sometimes isn’t it wicked to be natural?”
“I do not understand. I do not sink Frosine is wicked. She’s so kind and gently. She adore Solonge. She’s brave. All day she work and sing. You do not sink she is all bad because she have childs?”
I did not immediately reply. I am wondering....
Have social conditions reached a very lofty status even yet when the finest, truest instincts implanted in humankind are often denied? Does not life mean effort, progress, human triumph? Can we not look forward to a better time when present manifestly imperfect conditions will be perfected?
“Yes, Anastasia,” I conclude; “the greatest man that ever lived should take off his hat to the humblest mother, for she has accomplished something he never could if he lived to be a thousand. But come! Let’s go out on the Grand Boulevard. I’ve been working too hard; I’m fagged, I’m stale, there’s a fog about my brain.”
Very proudly she dons her furs of electric rabbit, and rather ruefully I wreathe myself in my conspiratorial cloak; then together we go down into the city.
The City of Light! Is there another, I wonder, that flaunts so superbly the triumph of man over darkness? From the Mount of Parnassus to the Mount of the Martyrs all is a valley of light. The starry sky is mocked by the starry city, its milky way, a river gleaming with gold, shimmering with silver, spangled with green and garnet. The Place de la Concorde is a very lily garden of light; up the jewelled sweep of the Champs Elysee the lights are like sheeny pearls with here and there the exquisite intrusion of a ruby; beneath a tremulous radiance of opals the trees are bathed in milky light, while amid the twinkling groves the night restaurants are sketched in fairy gold. The Grand Boulevards are fiery-walled canyons down which roar tumultuous rivers of light; the Place de l’Opera is a great eddy, flashing and myriad-gemmed; the magasins are blazing furnaces erupting light at every point: They are festooned with flame; they are crammed with golden lustre; they blaze their victorious refulgence in signs of light against the sky. And so night after night this city of sovereign splendour hurls in flashing light its gauntlet of defiance to the Dark.
The pavements are packed with people, moving slowly in opposing streams. Most are garbed in ceremonial best; and many carry flowers, for this is the sacred day of family gathering. The pavement edge is lined with tiny booths and shrill with importunate clamour.
We stop to gaze at some of the mechanical toys. Here are aeroplanes that whirl around, peacocks that strut and scream, rabbits that hop and squeak, shoe-blacks, barbers, acrobats, jugglers, all engaged in their various ways. But what amuses us most is a little servant maid who walks forward in a great hurry carrying a pile of plates, trips, sends them scattering, then herself falls sprawling. How I laugh! Yet I am at the same time laughing at myself for laughing. Am I going back to my second childhood? No! for see; all those bearded Frenchmen are laughing too, just like so many grown-up children.