Mary McCarthy
THE CICERONE
When they first met him, in the
wagons-Zits,
he was not so
nervous. Tall, straw-colored, standing smoking in the corridor, he
looked like an English cigarette. Indeed, there was something about
him so altogether parched and faded that he seemed to bear the same
relation to a man that a Gpld Flake bears to a normal cigarette.
English, surely, said the young American lady. The young American
man was not convinced.
If
English, then a bounder, he said, adjusting
his glasses to peer at the stranger with such impassioned curiosity
that.
his
eyes in their light-brown frames seemed to rush dangerously
forward, like strange green headlights on an old-fashioned car. As
yet, he felt no unusual interest in the stranger who had just emerged
from a compartment; this curiosity w.as his ordinary state of being.
It was so hard, the young lady complained, to tell a bounder in
a foreign country; one was never sure; those dreadful striped suits
that English gentlemen wear . . . and the Duke of Windsor talking
in
a cockney accent. Here on the Continent, continued the young
man, it was even more confusing, with the upper classes trying to
dress like English gentlemen and striking the inevitable false notes;
the dukes all looked like floorwalkers, but every man who looked like
a floorwalker was unfortunately not a duke. Their conversation con–
tinued
in
an agreeable rattle-rattle. Its inspiration, the Bounder, was
already half-dismissed. It was not quite clear to either of them whe–
ther they were trying to get into European society or whether this was
simply a joke that they had between them. The young man had
lunched with a viscountess in Paris and had admired her house and
her houseboat, which was docked in the Seine. They had poked their
heads into a great many courtyards in the Faubourg St. Germain,
including the very grandiose one, bristling with guards who instantly
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