and perfected in France before we in America woke up to appreciate
their use? Is it, therefore, not possible to take life easily and
still achieve?

The logic of these arguments, set forth in _Le Soir_ in an article
on the New World, appealed strongly to Jefferson Ryder as he sat
in front of the Cafe de la Paix, sipping a sugared Vermouth. It
was five o'clock, the magic hour of the _aperitif_, when the
glutton taxes his wits to deceive his stomach and work up an
appetite for renewed gorging. The little tables were all occupied
with the usual before-dinner crowd. There were a good many
foreigners, mostly English and Americans and a few Frenchmen,
obviously from the provinces, with only a sprinkling of real
Parisians.

Jefferson's acquaintance with the French language was none too
profound, and he had to guess at half the words in the article,
but he understood enough to follow the writer's arguments. Yes, it
was quite true, he thought, the American idea of life was all
wrong. What was the sense of slaving all one's life, piling up a
mass of money one cannot possibly spend, when there is only one
life to live? How much saner the man who is content with enough
and enjoys life while he is able to. These Frenchmen, and indeed
all the Continental nations, had solved the problem. The gaiety of
their cities, and this exuberant joy of life they communicated to
all about them, were sufficient proofs of it.

Fascinated by the gay scene around him Jefferson laid the newspaper
aside. To the young American, fresh from prosaic money-mad New
York, the City of Pleasure presented indeed a novel and beautiful
spectacle. How different, he mused, from his own city with its one
fashionable thoroughfare--Fifth Avenue--monotonously lined for miles
with hideous brownstone residences, and showing little real animation
except during the Saturday afternoon parade when the activities of
the smart set, male and female, centred chiefly in such exciting
diversions as going to Huyler's for soda, taking tea at the Waldorf,
and trying to outdo each other in dress and show. New York
certainly was a dull place with all its boasted cosmopolitanism.
There was no denying that. Destitute of any natural beauty,
handicapped by its cramped geographical position between two rivers,
made unsightly by gigantic sky-scrapers and that noisy monstrosity
the Elevated Railroad, having no intellectual interests, no art
interests, no interest in anything not immediatel