Brussels was, of course, much smaller than Paris, less ostentatiously "grand" or "cosmopolitan." Janet did not agree with the orthodox tourist opinion that the Belgian capital was merely a pocket edition of the Gallic. Brussels was lively without being chaotic, and picturesque without being dirty. Paris, on the other hand, was in some respects a very American city. Its Rue Royales, Champs Elysees, Faubourg St. Germains and other show sections were perhaps more numerous and certainly more beautiful than the corresponding show sections in New York. But apart from these picked quarters, Paris and New York had the same tawdry glitter, the same rag-bag dishevelment, the same noisy, neurotic people, the same morbid chase after pleasure. These results of modern civilization seemed by no means entirely missing from Brussels, but they existed in a smaller degree, even in proportion to the city’s size. Life on the streets of Brussels still had an appearance of being orderly, sane. You could walk along the main thoroughfares without the sensation that you were steering your way through scurrying, erratic, homicidal pedestrians. In a crowd in New York or Paris you might well become a prey to the fear that Darwin was right, after all, and that the evolution of man was guided chiefly by the principle of chance, Nature being a sort of brute Junker force which imposed _Kultur_ on the survivors. With these reflections, Janet sailed along, and though remembrance of the quarrel with Claude gave her an occasional sinking feeling, this was but the ground swell after the storm. *IV* At the Grands Magasins de la Bourse, Janet experienced little difficulty in making several minor purchases. Not because she had memorized a score of colloquial questions and answers from her little book, "French Guaranteed in Ten Lessons." For the questions and answers which she had conned so trippingly from the text were amazingly inapplicable to her needs. In the realm of trade or barter the phrases she needed always called for a subtly different twist from the high-flown phrases in the text-book. The book model advised her to say: "_Sir_ (_or Madam_), _have the kindness to direct me to the street by which one may proceed to the Rue Royale_." She actually wanted to say: "_What’s a good short-cut to the Rue Royale?_" But as to this racier version the text-book was mute.