Page:Master Eustace (1920).djvu/122

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112
Master Eustace


fancied, with certain luscious perfumes hovering about the brilliantly-polished window of the hairdresser's establishment adjacent to the restaurant. Then there was a woman in a minutely-fluted cap selling violets in a little handcart, which she gently pushed along over the smooth asphalt, and which, as she passed, left a sensible trace in the thick mild air. All this made a thoroughly Parisian mixture, and I envied Sanguinetti the privilege of spending his life in a city in which even the humblest of one's senses was the medium of poetic impressions. There was poetry in the warm, succulent exhalations of the opposite restaurant, where, among the lighted lamps, I could see the little tables glittering with their glass and silver, the tenderly-brown rolls nestling in the petals of the folded napkins, the waiters in their snowy aprons standing in the various attitudes of imminent empressement, the agreeable dame de comptoir sitting idle for the moment and rubbing her plump white hands. To a person so inordinately fond of chocolate as myself—there was literally a pretty little box half emptied of large soft globules of the compound standing at that moment on my table, for all the world as if I had been a sweet-toothed school-girl—there was of course something very agreeable in the faint upward gusts of the establishment in my rez-de-chaussée. Presently, too, it appeared to me that the savors