From here we went to a Paris florist’s where Madame pinned bright _boutonnières_ on our coats, and thence to the bootmaker’s where Madame again assisted her husband in the conduct of his business. Everywhere I went in Paris I was struck by this charming unity in the conduct of business between husband and wife and son and daughter. We talk much about the economic independence of women in America. It seems to me that the French have solved it in the only way that it can be solved. Madame helps her husband in his business and they make a success of it together. Monsieur Galoyer took the measurements for my shoes, but Madame entered them in a book; and to me the shop was fifty times as charming for her presence. She was pleasingly dressed, and the shop looked as though it had experienced the tasteful touches of a woman’s hand. It was clean and bright and smart, and smacked of good housekeeping; and this was equally true of bookstalls, haberdashers’ shops, art-stores, coffee-rooms, and places of public sale generally. Wherever Madame was, and she looked nice, there was a nice store; and Monsieur looked as fat and contented as could reasonably be expected under the circumstances. [Illustration: The French have made much of the Seine] From Galoyer’s we struck forth to Paris proper, its most interesting features, and I recall now with delight how fresh and trig and spick it all seemed. Paris has an air, a presence, from the poorest quarter of the Charenton district to the perfections of the Bois and the region about the Arc de Triomphe. It chanced that the day was bright and I saw the Seine, as bright as new buttons glimmering over the stones of its shallow banks and racing madly. If not a majestic stream it is at least a gay and dashing one--quick-tempered, rapid-flowing, artistically walled, crossed by a score of handsome bridges, and ornamented in every possible way. How much the French have made of so little in the way of a river! It is not very wide--about one-half as wide as the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge and not so wide as the Harlem River which makes Manhattan an island. I followed it from city wall to city wall one day, from Charenton to Issy, and found every inch of it delightful. I was never tired of looking at the wine barges near Charenton; the little bathing pavilions and passenger boats in the vicinity of the Louvre; the brick-barges, hay-barges, coal-barges and Heaven knows what else plying between the city’s heart and points downstream past Issy. It gave me the impression of being one of the brightest, cleanest rivers in the world--a river on a holiday. I saw it once at Issy at what is known in Paris as the “green hour”--which is five o’clock--when the sun was going down and a deep palpable fragrance wafted from a vast manufactory of perfume filled the air. Men were poling boats of hay and laborers in their great wide-bottomed corduroy trousers, blue shirts and inimitable French caps, were trudging homewards, and I felt as