him courage for the next encounter with Rhoda, whom he was to accompany on shopping and sightseeing rounds.
The Paris in which he appeared with Rhoda was the Paris reserved for travellers,—the smart shops, the fashionable theatres and restaurants, the Louvre,—and to satisfy her curiosity in regard to haunts of iniquity he took her to garish and expensive cabarets that he had never set foot in. There they saw many people from Hollywood. It hurt him that Rhoda should carry away images of him in settings so utterly unrepresentative of his life, but the alternative of taking her to his own haunts and presenting her to Marthe or the Casimirs or the ribald intellectuals was still riskier, for if he did that, heaven knew what distorted images Rhoda would carry away from it all. In the immortal phrase of his countrymen you had to be educated up to Bohemia before you could apprehend its essence, and though Rhoda was quick at the uptake she wasn't sufficiently in key with the phases of life that interested him to respond intuitively—the only kind of response that counted. If Floss had only been in town it would have been simple, for in Floss's peach-bloom salon Rhoda could have watched the daily parade of lost souls without being in any way committed, and gone home secure in the knowledge that she had seen more famous and infamous riff-raff at close quarters than any nice girl from Boston had ever been vouchsafed on the strength of an eight-day visit.
