Like all cultivated people, particularly those who attach much importance to pleasure and amusement, variety, art, and the play, Nigel was very fond of Paris; it always pleased him to go there; and yet he doubted if he were quite as fond of it in reality as he was in theory. The best acting, the best cooking, the best millinery in the world was to be found in Paris; and yet Nigel wasn't sure that he didn't enjoy those things more when he got them in London--that he enjoyed French cooking best in an English restaurant, and even a French play at an English theatre. Certainly Paris was the centre of art. Nigel was fond of pictures, and he amused himself more with a few young French artists whom he happened to know living here than with anybody else in the city; and yet when he went back to London he sometimes felt that the recollection of it, the chatter of studios, the slang of the critics, even the whole sense and sound of Paris gave him a little the recollection as of a huge cage of monkeys. Like most modern Englishmen, he talked disparagingly about British hypocrisy, Anglo-Saxon humbug, English stiffness and London fog; and yet, after all, he missed and valued these very things. Wasn't the fog and the hypocrisy--one was the symbol of the other--weren't all these things the very charm of London? Fog and hypocrisy--that is to say, shadow, convention, decency--these were the very things that lent to London its poetry and romance. Everything in Paris, it was true, was picturesque, everything had colour and form, everything made a picture. But it was all too obvious; everything was all there ready for one's amusement, ready for one's pleasure. People were too obliging, too willing. And the men! Well, Nigel was far more of a _viveur_, of a lover of pleasure than ninety-nine Englishmen out of a hundred, yet he found too much of that point of view among the men he came across in Paris. From boys to old gentlemen, from the artists to a certain set among the _haute finance_--of whom he had some acquaintances--from the sporting young sprig of the Faubourg to the son of the sham jeweller in the Rue de Rivoli--all, without a single exception, seemed to think of nothing else but pleasure, in other words, of _les petites femmes_. For that--paying attention more or less serious to _les petites femmes_--seemed the one real idea of pleasure. Of this point of view Nigel certainly grew very tired, and he marvelled at the wonderful energy, the unflagging interest in the same eternal subject.