she said sadly, fatally, but with an eager glint of inquiry in her old eyes. “All the Americans go to the café’s. It’s the only place there is to go to here.”
Towards ten o’clock, which was the hour of retiring, he escaped from her and went to the café of which she had spoken. There was an orchestra of three pieces playing the kind of music that is played in French cafés; and many mirrors, and long seats of old worn leather around the walls; and several young prostitutes sitting singly at tables, patiently ogling the sporting males of Orléans, who stroked their moustaches and ogled back, but spent no money on them. And there was one extremely lovely, blond, seductive and experienced-looking prostitute from Paris who ogled no one, but sat by herself at a table, frowning reflectively with half-closed eyes and with a cigarette in her mouth, studiously involved in solitaire and completely indifferent to the gallantries of the ogling males of Orléans, although many a languishing look was cast in her direction. The men played cards or dominoes together, held their secret, sly, and whispered conversations, and then roared with laughter; the café orchestra played the music that a French café orchestra always plays; the waiters went back and forth with trays and glasses; the proprietor went from table to table talking to his regular patrons; the women sat patiently at tables, and smiled and ogled when they caught somebody’s eye; and somehow the whole scene was instantly, poignantly familiar, like something he had known all his life.
And he did not know why this was true. But something essential in the substance and the structure of the scene—the beautiful and sophisticated prostitute from Paris, the seducers and gallants of the town of Orléans, the feeling of silence, secrecy, and darkness all around him in the old sleeping town—in which this place was now the only spot of warmth and gaiety and lightness—even the occasional shrill fife and piping whistle at the railway station not far away—all these things and people had their counterpart, somehow, in the life of small towns everywhere and in the life he had known in a small town as a child, when he had lain in his bed in darkness and had heard the distant wail and thunder of a departing train, and had seen then in the central core and vision of his heart’s desire, his image of the distant, the shining, the fabulous, thousand-spired, magic city, and had thought then of a lovely and seductive red-haired woman named Norah Ryan, who had that year come from the great city to live there in his mother’s house, and
