These soldiers were the first to command Kendall’s interest, but it expanded to cover every one. Ancient drivers of _voitures_ whose horses were always too tired to take him where he wanted to go; the chauffeurs of taxi-cabs who could never understand his French, and who, when he had made them understand, told him they could not take him to his destination because they happened to be heading the other way; the crowds who occupied the tables under the awnings on the sidewalks of the rue de la Paix or the rue Royale; the old women who came to collect two sous if one took a seat along the Champs Élysées or the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne; the soldiers, French, Belgian, Italian, Austrian, Canadian, English, Moroccan, American, who promenaded of evenings and Sundays from the Place de la Concorde to Rond-Point, and the girls with whom they promenaded—all these interested him, and each, as he studied them with boyish _naïveté_, added something to his education. He worked hard by day, and often far into the night, but for the most part his evenings were free to investigate life with Bert Stanley, whose investigations were merely of the surface and were rather questings for an hour of amusement.... Sometimes he played bridge with three other Americans at the Union, but he liked best to stroll about the darkened streets, without object or destination. Little by little he added to his meager store of the language. When he spoke to friends about securing an instructor they laughed at him. “Pick it up.... Talk to people,” they told him. “Sit down on a bench along the Champs Élysées and talk to a girl. They’re as eager to learn English as you are French.... It’s better than a teacher—and a darned sight more pleasant.” He voiced his distaste for this suggestion. He had been but two weeks in Paris, and very mistakenly had classified all the girls who promenade the Champs Élysées in the evening as women of the streets. His natural decency revolted at any contact, no matter how slight, with these. “Nine out of ten of those little girls work in shops or offices,” Bert told him. “You haven’t got ’em right, son.” But Kendall was suspicious. He continued in that attitude until one evening a little girl—she appeared not more than seventeen—sat rather diffidently on the other end of his bench. “Good night, monsieur,” she said, with quaint pronunciation. He did not answer, but turned his back with a gesture of repulse. “Oh, monsieur, please,” she said, timidly. “I am not a bad girl.... See.” She turned her face so that the dim light shone upon it and pointed to her cheeks. “There is not paint. You see. No.... I am a good girl, but monsieur, I am—how do you say _solitaire_? I learn English.... It will not harm monsieur if I talk with him a little and learn English.”