By Reason Of Circumstances Over Which He Had No Control, But Which
Had Mainly To Do With A Locked-Up Wardrobe, An American Of Convivial
Mentality Was In His Room At His Hotel One Evening, Fairly Consumed
With Loneliness.
Above all things he desired to be abroad amid
the life and gayety of the French capital; but unfortunately he
had no clothes except boudoir clothes, and no way of getting any,
either, Which made the situation worse.
He had already tried the
telephone in a vain effort to communicate with a ready-made clothing
establishment in the Rue St. Honore. Naturally he had failed, as
he knew he would before he tried. Among Europeans the telephone
is not the popular and handy adjunct of every-day life it is among
us. The English have small use for it because it is, to start with,
a wretched Yankee invention; besides, an Englishman in a hurry
takes a cab, as his father before him did - takes the same cab his
father took, if possible - and the Latin races dislike telephone
conversations because the gestures all go to absolute waste. The
French telephone resembles a dingus for curling the hair. You
wrap it round your head, with one end near your mouth and the other
end near your ear, and you yell in it a while and curse in it a
while; and then you slam it down and go and send a messenger. The
hero of the present tale, however, could not send a messenger - the
hotel people had their orders to the contrary from one who was not
to be disobeyed.
Finally in stark desperation, maddened by the sounds of sidewalk
revelry that filtered up to him intermittently, he incased his
feet in bed-room slippers, slid a dressing gown over his pajamas,
and negotiated a successful escape from the hotel by means of a
rear way. Once in the open he climbed into a handy cab and was
driven to the cafe of his choice, it being the same cafe mentioned
a couple of paragraphs ago.
Through a side entrance he made a hasty and unhindered entrance
into this place - not that he would have been barred under any
circumstances, inasmuch as he had brought a roll with him. A
person with a cluster of currency on hand is always suitably dressed
in Paris, no matter if he has nothing else on; and this man had
brought much ready cash with him. He could have gone in fig-leaved
like Eve, or fig-leafless like September Morn, it being remembered
that as between these two, as popularly depicted, Morn wears even
less than Eve. So he whisked in handily, and when he had hidden
the lower part of himself under a table he felt quite at home and
proceeded to have a large and full evening.
Soon there entered another American, and by that mental telepathy
which inevitably attracts like-spirit to like-spirit he was drawn
to the spot where the first American sat.
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