was a good hairdresser and a thrifty soul,
and he wanted to get on in life, and at that time nothing seemed to him
so profitable an investment as to set up a shop in the neighbourhood
patronized by Americans. American students were always wanting their
hair washed, so he was told--once a week at least--and in that they
differed from the Russian and Polish and Roumanian and other students of
Paris, a fact which determined Antoine to go into business at the
Montparnasse end of the Quarter, rather than at the lower end, say round
the Pantheon and Saint-Etienne-du-Mont. And as he determined to put his
prices low, in order to catch the trade, so later on when his business
thrived enormously, he continued to keep them low, in order to maintain
his clients. For if you once get used to having your hair washed for two
francs, and very well done at that, it is annoying to find that the
price has gone up over night to the prices one pays on the Boulevard
Capucines. Therefore for ten years Antoine continued to wash hair at two
francs a head, and at the same time he earned quite a reputation for
himself as a marvellous good person when it came to waves and curls. So
that when the war broke out, and his American clients broke and ran, he
had a neat, tidy sum saved up, and could be fairly complacent about it
all. Moreover, he was a lame man, one leg being some three inches
shorter than the other, due to an accident in childhood, so he had never
done his military service in his youth, and while not over military age,
even yet, there was no likelihood of his ever being called upon to do
it. So he stood in the doorway of his deserted shop, for all his young
assistants, his curlers and shampooers, had been mobilized, and looked
up and down the deserted street, and congratulated himself that he was
not in as bad a plight, financially and otherwise, as some of his
neighbours.

Next door to him was a restaurant where the students ate, many of them.
It had enjoyed a high reputation for cheapness, up to the war, and twice
a day had been thronged with a mixed crowd of sculptors and painters
and writers, and just dilettantes, which latter liked to patronize it
for what they were pleased to call "local colour." Well, look at it now,
thought the thrifty Antoine. Everyone gone, except a dozen stranded
students who had not money enough to escape, and who, in the kindness of
their hearts, continued to eat here "on credit," in order to keep the
propri