I can learn all that, it only means a little more effort and a little more self-control.
Sometimes of course they overdo it, the pros, their charm becomes so mechanical that it ceases to work; people see through it, and feeling they’ve been duped are resentful.”
He gave Charley another of his piercing glances.
“Your charm is natural, that’s why it’s so devastating.
Isn’t it absurd that a tiny wrinkle should make life so easy for you?”
“What on earth do you mean?”
“One of the reasons why I wanted you to come over was to see exactly in what your charm consisted.
As far as I can tell it depends on some peculiar muscular formation of your lower orbit.
I believe it to be due to a little crease under your eyes when you smile.”
It embarrassed Charley to be thus anatomized, and to divert the conversation from himself, he asked:
“But all this effort of yours, what is it going to lead you to?”
“Who can tell?
Let’s go and have our coffee at the Dome.”
“All right.
I’ll get hold of a waiter.”
“I’m going to stand you your dinner.
It’s the first meal that we’ve had together that I’ve ever paid for.”
When he took out of his pocket some notes to settle up with he found with them a couple of cards.
“Oh, look, I’ve got a ticket for you for the Midnight Mass at St. Eustache.
It’s supposed to be the best church music in Paris and I thought you’d like to go.”
“Oh, Simon, how nice of you.
I should love to.
You’ll come with me, won’t you?”
“I’ll see how I feel when the time comes.
Anyhow take the tickets.”
Charley put them in his pocket.
They walked to the Dome.
The rain had stopped, but the pavement was still wet and when the light of a shop window or a street lamp fell upon it, palely glistened.
A lot of people were wandering to and fro.
They came out of the shadow of the leafless trees as though from the wings of a theatre, passed across the light and then were lost again in another patch of night.
Cringing but persistent, the Algerian peddlers, their eyes alert for a possible buyer, passed with a bundle of Eastern rugs and cheap furs over their arms.
Coarse-faced boys, a fez on their heads, carried baskets of monkey-nuts and monotonously repeated their raucous cry: cacaouettes, cacaouettes.
At a corner stood two negroes, their dark faces pinched with cold, as though time had stopped and they waited because there was nothing in the world to do but wait.
The two friends reached the Dome.
The terrace where in summer the customers sat in the open was glassed in.
Every table was engaged, but as they came in a couple got up and they took the empty places.
It was none too warm, and Simon wore no coat.
“Won’t you be cold?” Charley asked him.
“Wouldn’t you prefer to sit inside?”
“No, I’ve taught myself not to mind cold.”
“What happens when you catch one?”
“I ignore it.”
Charley had often heard of the Dome, but had never been there, and he looked with eager curiosity at the people who sat all round them.
There were young men in turtle-neck sweaters, some of them with short beards, and girls bare-headed, in raincoats; he supposed they were painters and writers, and it gave him a little thrill to look at them.
“English or American,” said Simon, with a scornful shrug of the shoulders.
“Wasters and rotters most of them, pathetically dressing up for a role in a play that has long ceased to be acted.”
Over there was a group of tall, fair-haired youths who looked like Scandinavians, and at another table a swarthy, gesticulating, loquacious band of Levantines.
But the greater number were quiet French people, respectably dressed, shopkeepers from the neighbourhood who came to the Dome because it was convenient, with a sprinkling of provincials who, like Charley, still thought it the resort of artists and students.
“Poor brutes, they haven’t got the money to lead the Latin Quarter life any more.
They live on the edge of starvation and work like galley-slaves.