at a table and pretend you
are reading."

We went in and did as he said. Soon a middle-aged woman in black sat
down at the other side of the table. She stared at us gloomily a
moment; then with a yawn she opened a book and calmly started making
notes. Presently, scowling over her work, she began muttering to
herself.

"You must not look up," I heard in French. "A Russian spy sits over
there. You wish to see my husband. Come to-night at nine o'clock to the
second floor of the Cafe Voltaire. He will be at the top of the stairs.
Good-by." And she yawned again over her writing.

"Now, this," I thought, "is a revolution!" I thoroughly approved of
this. The Cafe Voltaire was an excellent choice, an almost perfect
mise-en-scene. It had long been one of my favorite haunts. A tall white
wooden building, so toned down, so tumbled down, so heavy laden with
memories of poets, dramatists, pamphleteers and fiery young orators, who
had sat here and conspired and schemed and exhorted over human rights.
It had well lived up to its glorious name. What great ideas had started
from here! Here French history had been made!

But alas! Into this hallowed spot that night, at nine o'clock on his way
to his train, came Joe in a yellow mackintosh with a brand-new suitcase
in his hand--and showed me history in the making. It was made in a
small, stuffy room upstairs. On the one side J. K. with a million
American readers behind him, on the other this revolutionist whose name
that week had been in newspapers all over the world. So far, so good.
But look at him, look at this history maker. Tall, sallow and dyspeptic,
a professor of economics. Romance, liberty, history, thrill? Not at all.
They talked of factories, wages, strikes, of railroads, peasants' taxes,
of plows and wheat and corn and hay! They got quite excited over hay.

And all this had to come through their defenseless interpreter--me. My
head ached, one foot fell asleep. The Social Democratic Party, the
Social Revolutionist Party, the Constitutional Democrats, in and out of
my head they trooped. If this be revolution, then God save the king!
Crushed to earth, as we left at last, my head still buzzing with
economics, I looked dismally back on my poor cafe, on liberty, justice
and human rights. There was something as bad as the harbor in Joe; he
was always spoiling everything.

"Why don't you take Carlyle's French Revolution along?" I suggested
forlornly. "You might read it on the tr