This meeting with William and Dora was fortunate from the point of view of my studies; for that very night, as I dined with them en pension, I found that providence, with his usual foresight, had placed me next to a very charming American girl of the type that I was particularly wishful to study. She seemed equally wishful to be studied, and we got on amazingly from the first moment of our acquaintance. By the middle of dinner we were pressing each other's feet under the table, and when coffee and cigarettes had come, we were affianced lovers. "Why should I blush to own I love?" was evidently my quaint little companion's motto; and indeed she didn't blush to own it to the whole table, and publicly to announce that I was the dearest boy, and absolutely the most lovable man she had met. There was nothing she wouldn't do for me. Would she brave the terrors of the Latin Quarter with me, I asked, and introduce me to the terrible Cafe d'Harcourt, about which William and Dora had suffered such searchings of heart? "Why, certainly; there was nothing in that," she said. So we went. Nothing is more absurd and unjust than those crude labels of national character which label one country virtuous and another vicious, one musical and another literary. Thus France has an unjust reputation for vice, and England an equally unjust reputation for virtue. I had always, I confess, been brought up to think of Paris as a sort of Sodom and Gomorrah in one. Good Americans might go to Paris, according to the American theory of a future state; but, certainly I had thought, no good Englishman ever went there--except, maybe, on behalf of the Vigilance Society. Well, it may sound an odd thing to say, but what impressed me most of all was the absolute innocence of the place. I mean this quite seriously. For surely one important condition of innocence is unconsciousness of doing wrong. The poor despised Parisian may be a very wicked and depraved person, but certainly he goes about with an absolute unconsciousness of it upon his gay and kindly countenance. "Seeing the world" usually means seeing everything in it that most decent people won't look at; but when you come to look at these terrible things and places, what do you find? Why, absolute disappointment! Have you ever read that most amusing book, "Baedeker on Paris"?