"Some idiot," remarked Eustace Vernon, sipping Vermouth at a little table, "insists that, if you sit long enough outside the Café de la Paix, you will see everyone you have ever known or ever wanted to know pass by. I have sat here for half-an-hour--and--voila."
"You met me, half an hour ago," said the other man.
"Oh, you!" said Vernon affectionately.
"And your hat has gone off every half minute ever since," said the other man.
"Ah, that's to the people I've known. It's the people I've wanted to know that are the rarity."
"Do you mean people you have wanted to know and not known?"
"There aren't many of those," said Vernon; "no it's--Jove, that's a sweet woman!"
"I hate the type," said the other man briefly: "all clothes--no real human being."
The woman was beautifully dressed, in the key whose harmonies are only mastered by Frenchwomen and Americans. She turned her head as her carriage passed, and Vernon's hat went off once more.
"I'd forgotten her profile," said Vernon, "and she's learned how to dress since I saw her last. She's quite human, really, and as charming as anyone ought to be."
"So I should think," said the other man. "I'm sorry I said that, but I didn't know you knew her. How's trade?"
"Oh, I did a picture--well, but a picture! I did it in England in the Spring. Best thing I've done yet. Come and see it."
"I should like to look you up. Where do you hang out?"
"Eighty-six bis Rue Notre Dame des Champs," said Vernon. "Everyone in fiction lives there. It's the only street on the other side that authors seem ever to have dreamed of. Still, it's convenient, so I herd there with all sorts of blackguards, heroes and villains and what not. Eighty-six bis."
"I'll come," said the other man, slowly. "Do you know, Vernon, I'd like awfully to get at your point of view--your philosophy of life?"
"Haven't you got one, my dear chap!--'sufficient unto' is my motto."
"You paint pictures,", the other went on, "so very much too good for the sort of life you lead."
Vernon laughed.
"My dear Temple," he said, "I live, mostly, the life of a vestal virgin."
"You know well enough I'm not quarrelling with the way you spend your evenings," said his dear Temple; "it's your whole outlook that doesn't match your work. Yet there must be some relation between the two, that's what I'd like to get at."