And, in any event, neither New York nor Chicago has any cafés. When I first went to New York drinking was still publicly going on but one stood up at a bar with the foot on a rail and shot the drink into oneself. There might be a moment of conversation with the bartender. “What chance you think the Giants got?” etc. Nothing specially helpful in that and anyway what one secretly hoped was that the White Sox of Chicago would win. Everyone lived in rooms, except those who had rich parents and most young American artists gathered in the city, ate at cafeterias. In Chicago, before I left, they had begun taking the chairs out of the restaurants and one fancied that, in a few years, all Chicagoans would eat as they drank, standing. It would save time. We more solemn and serious American scribblers, painters, etc., for the most part lived in rooms and I have myself a memory of rooms in which I have lived, that is like a desert trail. I can no longer recall all of them. In a sense they haunt my whole life. At a little distance they become gray, little gray holes into which I have crept. And we Americans have enough of the blood of the northern races in us that we must have our holes into which to creep, to contemplate ourselves, to say our prayers. In Paris, during a summer when I loitered there, I found myself able to sit all afternoon in a café, watching the people pass up and down a little street. At another café across a small square a young student made love to a girl. He kept touching her body with his hands and laughing and occasionally he kissed her. That happened and carts passed. One side of my mind made little delightful mental notes. The French teamsters did not make geldings of their horses. Magnificent stallions passed drawing dust carts. Why did Americans unman stallions while the French did not? The teamster walked in the road with his hat cocked to the side of his head and a bit of color in the hat. The stallion threw back his head and trumpeted. The teamster made some sort of sarcastic comment to the student with the girl, who answered in kind but did not quit kissing her. There was a small church on the west side of the square and old women were going in and coming out. All these things happened and I was alive to them all and still I sat in a café writing a tale of life in my own Ohio towns. How natural it seemed, in Paris, to lead one’s secret inner life quite openly in the streets and how unnatural the same sort of thing would have seemed in an American city.