I had been to a hypnotic _séance_ and was on my way home across the Paris boulevards. The sirens of the _trottoirs_ were sitting in front of the brightly-lit _brasseries_ with their lords, drinking beer, while others were still wandering up and down under the wide awnings in front of the _cafés_. The thought occurred to me how much the type had altered during the last four years; it used to be the fashion to be as slim as a willow, with stays like a coat of mail, but now loose, negligent figures were to be seen under tight-fitting dresses, and where formerly people used to wear buds, they now decorated themselves with full-blown flowers. The rattling of the omnibuses mingled with the strident music of a Roumanian band in one of the neighbouring _brasseries_, and one’s eyes were dazzled by the glitter of real and false diamonds, and by the glances of their wearers, real or false as the case might be. The faces of the multitude as they swept past me were confounded in my mind with those I had just seen in the over-heated hall where the hypnotic _séance_ had taken place. The perfumes that were wafted through the air were transformed in the memory of my olfactory nerves to the penetrating scents of musk, patchouli and _poudre-de-riz_, which the Parisian ladies carry with them into all theatres, omnibuses, and picture galleries whither they go, charging the atmosphere with a strong, oppressive, artificial odour, exquisitely compounded, and dry as the colours of the majority of modern French artists--a suspicious atmosphere, the excessive sensibility of which suggests sickness and hidden corruption. Again I seemed to see the faces of those who surrounded me in the close atmosphere of the small room where the newest fashionable pastime, a demonstration of the “magic circle,” had taken place--empty, weak, brutal, affected faces, such as form the larger portion of every popular assembly; and suddenly I realised, what my instinct had long since told me, the difference that exists between the expression on the faces of this race and the expression on the faces of that other race, to which I myself belonged, and which in its national varieties I had taken infinite trouble to understand, perhaps not altogether without success.