Let Us, For The Further Adornment And Final Elaboration Of The
Illustration, Say That You Are Sitting At One Of The Small Round
Tables Which Make Mushroom Beds Under The Awnings Along The
Boulevards.
All about you are French people, enjoying themselves
in an easy and a rational and an inexpensive manner.
As for
yourself, all you desire is a quiet half hour in which to read
your paper, sip your coffee, and watch the shifting panorama of
street life. That emphatically is all you ask; merely that and a
little privacy. Are you permitted to have it? You are not.
Beggars beseech you to look on their afflictions. Sidewalk venders
cluster about you. And if you are smoking the spark of your cigar
inevitably draws a full delegation of those moldy old whiskerados
who follow the profession of collecting butts and quids. They
hover about you, watchful as chicken hawks; and their bleary eyes
envy you for each puff you take, until you grow uneasy and
self-reproachful under their glare, and your smoke is spoiled for
you. Very few men smoke well before an audience, even an audience
of their own selection; so before your cigar is half finished you
toss it away, and while it is yet in the air the watchers leap
forward and squabble under your feet for the prize. Then the
winner emerges from the scramble and departs along the sidewalk
to seek his next victim, with the still-smoking trophy impaled
on his steel-pointed tool of trade.
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