Discreet applause broke forth, and exclamations such as “wonderful,” “what grace,” “Vivent les Espagnoles,” for the discriminating audience took no heed of independence days, of mere political changes and the like, and seemed to think that Buenos Aires was a part of Spain, never having heard of San Martin, Bolivar, Paez, and their fellow-liberators. Paris, London, and New York were to that fashionable crowd the world, and anything outside—except, of course, the Hungarian gipsies and the Tango dancers—barbarous and beyond the pale. After the Tango came “La Maxixe Brésilienne,” rather more languorous and more befitting to the dwellers in the tropics than was its cousin from the plains. Again the discreet applause broke out, the audience murmuring “charming,” that universal adjective that gives an air of being in a perpetual pastrycook’s when ladies signify delight. Smiles and sly glances at their friends showed that the dancers’ efforts at indecency had been appreciated. Slowly the hall and tea-rooms of the great hotel emptied themselves, and in the corridors and passages the smell of scent still lingered, just as stale incense lingers in a church. Motor-cars took away the ladies and their friends, and drivers, who had shivered in the cold whilst the crowd inside sweated in the central heating, exchanged the time of day with the liveried doorkeepers, one of them asking anxiously, “Dis, Anatole, as-tu vu mes vaches?” With the soft closing of a well-hung door the last car took its perfumed freight away, leaving upon the steps a group of men, who remained talking over, or, as they would say, undressing, all the ladies who had gone. “Argentine Tango, eh?” I thought, after my friends had left me all alone. Well, well, it has changed devilishly upon its passage overseas, even discounting the difference of the setting of the place where first I saw it danced so many years ago. So, sauntering down, I took a chair far back upon the terrace of the Café de la Paix, so that the sellers of _La Patrie_, and the men who have some strange new toy, or views of Paris in a long album like a broken concertina, should not tread upon my toes. Over a Porto Blanc and a Brazilian cigarette, lulled by the noise of Paris and the raucous cries of the street-vendors, I fell into a doze. Gradually the smell of petrol and of horse-dung, the two most potent perfumes in our modern life, seemed to be blown away. Dyed heads and faces scraped till they looked blue as a baboon’s; young men who looked like girls, with painted faces and with mincing airs; the raddled women, ragged men, and hags huddled in knitted shawls, lame horses, and taxi-cab drivers sitting nodding on their boxes—all faded into space, and from the nothing that is the past arose another scene.