She turned to Frances, sitting smiling, her hands folded, her head poised on her long neck, her lips pursed ready to start talking again.
“No, I don’t like Paris. It’s expensive and dirty.”
“Really? I find it so extraordinarily clean. One of the cleanest cities in all Europe.”
“I find it dirty.”
“How strange! But perhaps you have not been here very long.”
“I’ve been here long enough.”
“But it does have nice people in it. One must grant that.”
Georgette turned to me. “You have nice friends.”
Frances was a little drunk and would have liked to have kept it up but the coffee came, and Lavigne with the liqueurs, and after that we all went out and started for Braddocks’s dancing-club.
The dancing-club was a bal musette in the Rue de la Montagne Sainte Genevieve. Five nights a week the working people of the Pantheon quarter danced there. One night a week it was the dancingclub. On Monday nights it was closed. When we arrived it was quite empty, except for a policeman sitting near the door, the wife of the proprietor back of the zinc bar, and the proprietor himself. The daughter of the house came down-stairs as we went in. There were long benches, and tables ran across the room, and at the far end a dancing-floor.
“I wish people would come earlier,” Braddocks said. The daughter came up and wanted to know what we would drink. The proprietor got up on a high stool beside the dancing-floor and began to play the accordion. He had a string of bells around one of his ankles and beat time with his foot as he played. Every one danced. It was hot and we came off the floor perspiring.
“My God,” Georgette said. “What a box to sweat in!”
“It’s hot.”
“Hot, my God!”
