About Paris . had tall yellow frontswith gray slate roofs, and roof-gardens of flowersand palms in pots. Some of the houses had ironbalconies, from which the women leaned andtalked across the street to one another in pur-ring nasal voices, with a great rolling of the rsand an occasional disdainful movement of theshoulders. When any other than a Frenchwoman shrugs her shoulders she moves thewhole upper part of her body, from the hips up;but the French womans shoulders and arms areall that change when she makes that ineffablegesture that we have settled upon as the char-acteristic one of her nat
About Paris . had tall yellow frontswith gray slate roofs, and roof-gardens of flowersand palms in pots. Some of the houses had ironbalconies, from which the women leaned andtalked across the street to one another in pur-ring nasal voices, with a great rolling of the rsand an occasional disdainful movement of theshoulders. When any other than a Frenchwoman shrugs her shoulders she moves thewhole upper part of her body, from the hips up;but the French womans shoulders and arms areall that change when she makes that ineffablegesture that we have settled upon as the char-acteristic one of her nation. In a street of like respectability to ours inLondon or New York those who lived on itwould know as little of their next-door neighboras of a citizen at another end of the town. Thehouse fronts would tell nothing to the outsideworld; they would frown upon each other likefamily tombs in a cemetery; but in this streetof Paris the people lived in it, or on the bal-conies, or at the windows. We knew what they. SHE LOOKED DOWN UPON OUR STREET THE STREETS OF PARIS H were going to have for dinner, because we couldsee them carrying the uncooked portions of itfrom the restaurant at the corner, with a longloaf of bread under one arm and a single egg inthe other hand; and when some one gave a fetewe knew of it by the rows of bottles on theledge of the window and the jellies set out tocool on the balcony. We were all interested inthe efforts of the stout gentleman in the short bluesmoking-jacket who taught his parrot to call tothe coachman of each passing fiacre ; he did thisevery night after dinner, with his cigarette in hismouth, and with great patience and took a common pride also in the flower-garden of the young people on the seventh floor,and in their arrangement of strings upon whichthe vines were to grow, and in the lines of roses,which dropped their petals whenever the windblew, upon the head of the concierge, so that shewould look up and shake her head at them,
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1900, bookidaboutparis03, bookyear1903
