melancholic it whispered unbearably sad secrets in your ear; if you were romantic it wove enchanted tapestries for you; but bitter dregs were at the bottom of every glass Paris had to offer. That's all right, thought Grover,—just sip carefully when you're nearing the dregs, and fool it.
His drowsy musings were interrupted by a young tenor voice, which emerged from the neighboring court where the carpet had been beaten into complete submission. The beater, rolling it into portable form, was singing snatches of a love song with a haunting twist in its rhythm, as though at intervals half a bar were dropped out. The singer was unseen, the song of no musical consequence, but there was in the timbre of the voice and in the blend of sentiment and irony it expressed something that gave Grover a hint as to the nature of his need for coming to Europe. I need Europe, he was thinking, because I believe in the ultimate significance of life, and in America they see only the immediate significance, if they see that. We Americans see the facts of life as a blur; we are like children rolling hoops through a garden. Europeans are gardeners who watch the children go scampering by, trampling the beds, occasionally stopping a moment to exclaim inanities over a rose-bush cultivated by dint of endless pains. From Maine to California no beater of carpets would have sung that sort of ditty in that sort of way; in America a cruder ditty would have been sung and the sentiment expressed would have
