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Chewing gum was not the only American vice which was in low repute at the Fanfaron. In fact, the exiles agreed that with the possible exceptions of Poland, Guatemala, and mid-Victorian England, the United States was the dumbest country that had ever existed. They were equally strong about the inferiority of American skyscrapers, pork and beans, Chicago, hired girls, jazz, Reno, evening-jacket lapels, Tom Thumb golf courses, aviation records, tooth paste, bungalows, kitchenettes, dinettes, diswashettes, eating tobacco, cafeterias, Booth Tarkington, corn flakes, flivvers, incinerators, corn on the cob, Coney Island, Rotarians, cement roads, trial marriages, Fundamentalism, preachers who talk on the radio, drugstore sandwiches, letters dictated but not read, noisy streets, noiseless typewriters, Mutt and Jeff, eye shades, mauve-and-crocus-yellow golf stockings, chile con carne, the Chrysler Building, Jimmy Walker, Hollywood, all the Ruths in Congress, Boy Scouts, Tourists–Welcome camps, hot dogs, Admiral Byrd, flagpole sitters, safety razors, the Chautauq
ua, and President Hoover.

The exiles unanimously declared that they were waiting to join the Foreign Legion of whatever country should first wipe out the United States in war.

For three months Whit was able to agree with all of this indictment, but a week after his picnic with Isadora he went suddenly democratic. Miles O’Sullivan had denounced the puerility of American fried chicken.

Now it was before dinner, and Miles was an excellent reporter. The more Whit listened, the more he longed for the crisp, crunching taste of fried chicken, with corn fritters and maple sirup, candied sweet potatoes, and all the other vulgarities loathed by the artistic American exiles who were brought up on them.

Whit sprang up, muttering “Urghhg,” which Miles took as a tribute to his wit.

It wasn’t.

Whit fled down the Boulevard Raspail. He had often noted, with low cultured sneers, a horribly American restaurant called “Cabin Mammy’s Grill. ” He plunged into it now. In a voice of restrained hysteria he ordered fried chicken, candied sweets and corn fritters with sirup.

Now, to be fair on all sides—which is an impossibility—the chicken was dry, the corn fritters were soggy, the fried sweets were poisonous and the sirup had never seen Vermont. Yet Whit enjoyed that meal more than any of the superior food he had discovered in Paris.

The taste of it brought back everything that was native in him…. Return home for Christmas vacation in his freshman year; the good smell of the midwestern snow; the girls whom he had loved as a brat; the boys with whom he had played. A dinner down at Momauguin in senior year, and the kindly tragedy of parting.

They had been good days; cool and realistic and decent.

So Whit came out of Cabin Mammy’s Grill thinking of snow on Chapel Street and the New Haven Green—and he was buffeted by the first snow of the Paris winter, and that wasn’t so good.

Although he was a college graduate, Whitney had learned a little about geography, and he shouldn’t have expected Paris to be tropical. Yet he had confusedly felt that this capital of the world could never conceivably be cold and grim. He turned up the collar of his light topcoat and started for—oh, for Nowhere.

After ten blocks, he was exhilarated by the snow and the blasty cold which had first dismayed him. From time to time he muttered something like a sketch for future thoughts:

“I can’t paint! I’d be all right drawing machinery for a catalogue. That’s about all! Paris! More beautiful than any town in America. But I’m not part of it. Have nothing to do with it. I’ve never met a real Frenchman, except my landlady, and that hired girl at the apartment and a few waiters and a few cops and the French literary gents that hang around the Fanfaron because we give ’em more of a hand than their own people would.