I turned, because his manner indicated clearly enough that I might, squarely round in my chair, and immediately it was clear to me why he had said just that. Any one would have said it—any other American, I mean—which makes it more striking—and said it involuntarily, too. You couldn’t have helped it. And yet you would encounter a dozen perfectly unmistakable Americans every day in Paris without feeling the necessity for any remark. It was simply that Corey was so typically the kind of American you _wouldn’t_ encounter in Paris, or any other place, you felt, outside his own country. The curious thing about him was that instantly on seeing him, almost before you thought of America, you thought of a particular and localized section of America. You thought of the Middle West. There was something wholesome and provincial and colloquial about him. He was like a boy you’d gone to grammar school with—the kind of fellow to succeed to his father’s business and marry and settle down in his home town, with New York City his farthest dream of venture and romance. Yet there he sat across the table from a dark-visaged Balkan officer who was carrying on the conversation in careful English—it would have been unimaginable that he should speak in anything _but_ English to him—and it may have been the brilliance of this man’s uniform which kept one, just at first, from seeing that he, too, our American, was wearing some sort of uniform, khaki color, very workman-like and shipshape, which might, if there had been the least chance of throwing us off, have thrown us. But his round, good-natured, uncomplicated face, his light brown hair and the way it was brushed—the very way it grew, like a school-boy’s—the comfortable set of his broad shoulders, his kind of energetic inclination to stoutness, and even the way he sat at the table, were pure American Middle West and nothing else, no matter what his uniform proclaimed. He was as American as the flag, as the opening bars of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” as American as Kansas, Missouri, and Iowa. And when, at young Homan’s exclamation, I had turned and found him looking straight toward me, the twinkle of his eyes had the effect of a friendly wave of his hand. He had, of course, as he said afterward, “spotted us,” too. Then he had seen—and it amused him—the little play of our discovery. I was just turning back to applaud to Homan the obviousness of his designation, and to wonder, with him, what the uniform meant, when my eye was caught by a thin, brilliantly colored line drawn, it seemed, just above the left breast pocket of his coat, and about the same length.