Other peoples, if they think at all, think
how to avoid work; the Parisians think incessantly, always,
how to provide themselves with more to do. Other peoples
drink to stupefy themselves lest peradventure in a leisure
moment they might be seized of a thought; Parisians drink to
stimulate themselves, to try to think more rapidly, to attract
ideas that might not enter and engage a sober and therefore
somewhat sluggish brain. Other peoples meet a new idea as if
it were a mortal foe; the Parisians as if it were a long-lost
friend. Other peoples are agitated chiefly, each man or
woman, about themselves; the Parisians are full of their work,
their surroundings, bother little about themselves except as
means to what they regard as the end and aim of life--to make
the world each moment as different as possible from what it
was the moment before, to transform the crass and sordid
universe of things with the magic of ideas. Being
intelligent, they prefer good to evil; but they have God's own
horror of that which is neither good nor evil, and spew it out
of their mouths.
At the moment of the arrival of Susan and Palmer the world
that labors at amusing itself was pausing in Paris on its way
from the pleasures of sea and mountains to the pleasures of
the Riviera and Egypt. And as the weather held fine, day
after day the streets, the cafes, the restaurants, offered the
young adventurers an incessant dazzling panorama of all they
had come abroad to seek.
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