The Frenchman nodded gravely. Yes, he had a married sister living in Versailles. "Well, there's a little drug-store out there, one of these peaceful, sleepy-looking, home-and-mother French drug-stores, with a big cat dozing in the window, and somebody in a white apron putting up pills behind the counter, and so far as anybody from _my_ part of the world can see, not enough business doing from one week's end to another, to buy a postage-stamp." The Frenchman laughed. "Oh, it's a very good business in France being a _pharmacien_." "That's what everybody tells me, and that's what gets me. _One_ of the things that gets me! In _our_ country when there is any business being done you hear the wheels going 'round.' I can't get used to this smooth European way of doing it and not letting on. Well, my main interest in life being the toilet preparations business I hardly ever go by one without stopping in. You never know when you're going to run onto something worthwhile. Well, out there in Versailles, I certainly did. I ran onto a genius. Yes, sir, that's not too much to say; a genius! Any man who can make a cold cream like that ..." He interrupted himself to ask: "You don't happen to be up on cold cream? No? It's a pity, because you can't appreciate what that man is doing. By George, I never saw anything like it, and I've dealt in cold creams for thirty years! It's got anything in America beaten a mile! The two great faults of cold cream, you see, are being greasy and being crumbly. This isn't either. And it keeps! He showed me some he'd had for four years in a pot, with just a flat earthenware lid laid on top, and you wouldn't believe it, Monsieur Portier, but it hadn't changed an atom, not an _atom_! And the fineness of it! The least little pinch between your fingers, and it just sinks right into your pores before your eyes! It's _like_ cream, thick, rich cream off a three-days-set pan of milk, and yet it don't run! And the perfume! Monsieur Portier, I give you my word for it, and I know what I'm talking about, the perfume that little old druggist out in his dinky little old shop has got into his cold cream is the only _refined_ cold cream perfume I ever smelled! It makes all the others smell like a third-rate actress. It's got a ... it's got a ..." He hesitated, searching for exactly the right word and brought it out with enthusiasm, "it's got a _clean_ smell, if you get me, like a nice girl after a bath! I've got daughters of my own," he added in whimsical justification of his metaphor. The Frenchman had been watching him with appreciative eyes. "Mr. Hale, I see that, like so many of your countrymen, you are a real artist in your line, and you have the artist's flavor." The American was disconcerted by this characterization. "Who? Me? I know a good thing when I see it, that's all, and that's _business_, that's not art."