“There is an excellent type; look at her.” “Now you see the chairs out in front. They are this way all over Paris.” I was looking at the interesting restaurant life, which never really seems to be interrupted anywhere in Paris. One can always find a dozen chairs, if not fifty or a hundred, somewhere out on the sidewalk, under the open sky or a glass roof, with little stone-topped tables beside them, the crowd surging to and fro in front. Here one can sit and have one’s coffee, liqueur, sandwich. Everybody seems to do it; it is as common as walking in the streets. We whirled through street after street, partaking of this atmosphere, and finally swung up in front of a rather plain hotel, which was close to the Avenue de l’Opéra, on the corner of the Rue St. Honoré and the Rue de l’Echelle. Our luggage was quickly distributed, and I was shown into my room by a maid who could not speak English. I unlocked my belongings and rapidly changed my clothes, while X., breathing mightily, fully arrayed, soon appeared, saying that I should await him at the door below, where he would arrive with our guests. I did so, and in fifteen minutes he returned, the taxi spinning up out of a steady stream that was flowing by. I think my head was dizzy with the whirl of impressions which I was garnering, but I did my best to keep a sane view of things, and to get my impressions as sharp and clear as I could. I am satisfied of one thing in this world, and that is that the commonest intelligence is very frequently confused or hypnotized or overpersuaded by certain situations, and that the weaker ones are ever full of the wildest forms of illusion. We talk about the sanity of life. I question whether it exists. Mostly it is a succession of confusing, disturbing impressions which are only rarely valid. This night I know I was moving in a sort of maze, and when I stepped into the taxi and was introduced to two ladies, I easily succumbed to what was obviously their great beauty. Greuze has painted over and over the type that I saw before me--soft, buxom, ruddy womanhood. I think the two may have been respectively twenty-four and twenty-six. The elder was smaller than the younger, although both were of good size, and not so ruddy; but both were plump, round-faced, dimpled, and with a wealth of brownish-black hair, white teeth, smooth, plump arms, necks, and shoulders. Their chins were adorably rounded, their lips red, and their eyes laughing and gay. They began laughing and chattering the moment I entered, extending their soft, white hands, and saying things in French which I could not understand. X. was smiling, beaming through his monocle in an amused, superior way. The older girl was arrayed in pearl-colored silk, with a black mantilla spangled with silver, and the younger had a dress of peachblow hue, with a white lace mantilla, that was also spangled, and they breathed a faint perfume.