no less foolish were the afternoons in the
depths of Fontainebleau or the sunlit green thickets of
Saint-Germain--no less foolish any of those afternoons in the forest or
the park to which a long drive by train, or tram, had carried us. And I
am prepared to admit the folly to-day as I sit at my elderly desk and
look out to the London sky, grey and drear as if the spring had gone
with my youth. But if I never again can be so foolish, at least I am
thankful that once I could, that once long ago I was young in Paris,
"the enchanted city with its charming smile for youth,"--that once I
believed in folly and, in so believing, had learned more of the true
philosophy of life than the most industrious student can ever dig out of
his books.

V

The afternoon at Versailles was the rare exception. We were too keen
about our work, or too dependent on it, to play truant often, however
gay the sunshine and convenient the trains. Nor was it any great
hardship not to, especially after we had broken loose once or twice so
successfully as to make sure we had not forgotten how. If we did stay in
the _Salon_ until we were turned out, the last to leave, Paris was
neither so dull nor so ugly at night that we need sigh for the suburbs.
It was an amusement simply to drink our coffee in front of a _cafe_, to
go on with the talk that must have had a beginning sometime somewhere,
but that never got anywhere near an end, and to watch the life of the
Paris streets.

I had got my initiation into _cafe_ life that first year in Italy and
had finished my education by cycle on French roads, where every evening
taught me the difference between the country where there is a _cafe_ to
pass an hour in over a glass of coffee after dinner, and England where
choice in the small town then lay between immediate bed or the
intolerable gloom of the Coffee Room. It is the real democrat like the
Frenchman or the Italian who knows how to take his ease in a _cafe_; the
Englishman, who hasn't an inkling of what the democracy he boasts of
means, fights shy of it. He does not mind making use of it when he is
away from home, but he is likely to be thanking his stars all the time
that in his part of the world nothing so promiscuous is possible. I
tried to point out its advantages once to an English University man.

"Aoh!" he said, "you know at Oxford we had our wines and we weren't
bothered by people."

But it is just the people part of it that is amusing, the more