It Was Attended With A Great Deal
Of Noisy Pleasantry, Flavored Every Now And Then With
A Dash Of Irritation.
There was a young man of whom
I made a note; he was such a beautiful specimen of
his class.
Sometimes he was very facetious, chatter-
ing, joking, punning, showing off; then, as the game
went on and he lost, and had to pay the _consomma-
tion_, he dropped his amiability, slanged his partner,
declared he wouldn't play any more, and went away
in a fury. Nothing could be more perfect or more
amusing than the contrast. The manner of the
whole affair was such as, I apprehend, one would not
have seen among our English-speaking people; both
the jauntiness of the first phase and the petulance of
the second. To hold the balance straight, however,
I may remark that if the men were all fearful "cads,"
they were, with their cigarettes and their inconsistency,
less heavy, less brutal, than our dear English-speaking
cad; just as the bright little cafe where a robust mater-
familias, doling out sugar and darning a stocking, sat
in her place under the mirror behind the _comptoir_,
was a much more civilized spot than a British public-
house, or a "commercial room," with pipes and whiskey,
or even than an American saloon.
XIII.
It is very certain that when I left Tours for Le
Mans it was a journey and not an excursion; for I
had no intention of coming back. The question, in-
deed, was to get away, - no easy matter in France, in
the early days of October, when the whole _jeunesse_
of the country is going back to school.
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