“Whereupon,” said Cherry-Marvel, his little eyes gleaming for a second with fury, “what _I_ said was, ‘Operations, where are thy stings?’ for, as of course you know as well as I do, women are scarcely women without them, and I have not the faintest doubt that in Lesbos they suffered, if I may put it like this, from the impolite insistence of their womanhood even more than if there had been any men there, for as I was saying to Marc only the other day, _à propos_ of the particular shade in which she had dyed her hair, men may come and men may go, but the moon, my dear boy, is always there. Now here, for instance, is Iris, quite one of the loveliest women I have ever seen, and one who, I am convinced, must be very fond of you with your sort of mind, here she has, I hear on the very best authority, fallen a victim to one of those mental derangements which seem, if I may put it like this, to be an irresistible incitement to polite surgery in quite another and more individual part of the person. But what I have always said about Iris is this, that I admire her so, and I am so positive that you also must, with your sort of mind, because she is one of the very few Englishwomen I have ever met who can, as I am sure you will agree with me, live abroad without becoming more and more English....” II Paris rises in a cloud of chill darkness, the rain falls like whips of ice, the street-lamps loiter on vague, bitter errands, confused strings of light, a stealthy, idiot wind glories in being corrupted by corners. The platforms of the omnibuses are packed tight with small men whose overcoats are too short for them, the brims of their felt-hats too narrow, their trousers turned up too high, their eyes too dark, their faces too pale. The jargon of the traffic on the rue de Rivoli, as it squabbles for every step between the deserted pavement beneath the railings of the Tuileries and the reeking pavement under the long archway lit by impudent shop-lights falling on imitation jewellery, is multiplied an hundred-fold by the shrewish air into a noise that hurts like warm water on a chill hand. The taxi, a clever little Citroën taxi, darted hither and thither among the squabbling hosts, and nimbly we capered across the dark face of the Louvre, nimbly over the Pont Royal and the river paved with broken darkness, and so down the slope into the rout of the Boulevard Raspail. Maybe it is true that there are times when we can detest Paris more deeply than any other city. Other cities stare back calmly at our sudden hatreds, other cities grow more impersonal as we execrate them, while as for Paris, she is always personal, but when we are nervous and detest her for being Paris she becomes even more herself, she insists on being herself with a nerveracking insistence, like a silly woman who, seeing she is getting on her man’s nerves, gives a loud, nervous laugh and simpers: “I can’t help it, it’s my nature to be like this....”