But I was saved from too much perplexity over what freedom might be doing to my compatriots by a gradual drifting into rather close companionship with a number of Americans like ourselves taking lectures at the Sorbonne, and the Collège de France. It was a great piece of luck for us since these Americans were all students of more experience and attainment than any one of us. There was Dr. John Vincent of the History Department of Johns Hopkins University, and along with him his wife who spent hours of every day making beautiful copies of canvases in the Luxembourg. There were Fred Parker Emery of the English Department of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his wife. There was a younger man, Charles D. Hazen, a Hopkins graduate—a man who was to make a distinguished career for himself in French history, and now Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia, the author of many valuable books. Serious work did not dull our new friends’ curiosity about French life in general nor prevent a humorous detached view of things. We soon were dining together every week in restaurants of the Quarter into which we had never ventured before. Here for one franc, fifty (thirty cents) we got a decent dinner—_vin compris_, as well as a gay company of students and their girls. They were so merry, so natural in their gaiety that none of us were anything but amused over their little ways. It was in one of these restaurants that for the first time in my life I saw a girl take out a compact, straighten her hat—her head had been on her cavalier’s shoulder and it was out of plumb—straighten her hat and powder her nose. That the day would come when the manners and customs of the Latin Quarter of the nineties would be the manners and customs of American girls in practically every rank of life would have been unthinkable to me then. Our new friends added greatly to the pleasure of the weekly sightseeing excursions which had been one of the features of The Plan. “Every week end, go somewhere”—I had laid down. So every Saturday we were taking a _bateau mouche_ or train or tram journey costing only a few of our precious sous—to Saint-Denis, the September fête at Saint-Cloud, Versailles. If the weather was bad we went to the museums, the churches, the monuments. Our new friends liked the idea. When spring came our promenades took on a wider range. There were week-end trips to Fontainebleau and to one after another of the great cathedral and château towns—Chartres, Beauvais, Rheims, Pierrefonds, Compiègne.