Garnett looked after him with a musing smile. The two had exchanged
views on life for two years without so much as knowing each other's
names. Garnett was a newspaper correspondent whose work kept him
mainly in London, but on his periodic visits to Paris he lodged in a
dingy hotel of the Latin Quarter, the chief merit of which was its
nearness to the cheap and excellent restaurant where the two
Americans had made acquaintance. But Garnett's assiduity in
frequenting the place arose, in the end, less from the excellence of
the food than from the enjoyment of his old friend's conversation.
Amid the flashy sophistications of the Parisian life to which
Garnett's trade introduced him, the American sage's conversation had
the crisp and homely flavor of a native dish--one of the domestic
compounds for which the exiled palate is supposed to yearn. It was a
mark of the old man's impersonality that, in spite of the interest
he inspired, Garnett had never got beyond idly wondering who he
might be, where he lived, and what his occupations were. He was
presumably a bachelor--a man of family ties, however relaxed, though
he might have been as often absent from home would not have been as
regularly present in the same place--and there was about him a
boundless desultoriness which renewed Garnett's conviction that
there is no one on earth as idle as an American who is not busy.
From certain allusions it was plain that he had lived many years in
Paris, yet he had not taken the trouble to adapt his tongue to the
local inflections, but spoke French with the accent of one who has
formed his conception of the language from a phrase-book.

The city itself seemed to have made as little impression on him as
its speech. He appeared to have no artistic or intellectual
curiosities, to remain untouched by the complex appeal of Paris,
while preserving, perhaps the more strikingly from his very