strolling slowly of an evening under the garish lights from stores selling jewellery and clothing and food and amusement. Sometimes she ate in a restaurant on Houston Street where she could obtain white caviar and strange, exotic dishes served nowhere else, while the proprietor, who had come to America from Romania, played the cymbalom, accompanied by a pathetic old blind man. She found down here a new standard of appraisal of these people, who, if for no other reason than that they, like her own race, had known bitter persecution, appealed to her with colour and romance and kindred emotions. She was often repelled by the bustling, noisy, aggressive younger generation, forever concerned with profits and losses. But the older generation, the women of the calm eyes and heavy wigs, the men with magnificent beards and extraordinarily well-formed features, appealed to her more than almost any other type she had ever seen.
Through the Italian section she wandered along sidewalks littered with fruit and vegetable stands, listening to voices singing to guitar accompaniment songs of Venice and Genoa and Naples. Diminutive Sicilians slithered past her in the shadows, huge Calabrians swaggered, haughty and handsome men and women from Milan and Tuscania occasionally strode proudly by. But most of all she loved the lightness and gaiety of the streets where the French lived, to listen to their gay lovemaking and the delicately beautiful songs which flowed forth as naturally as did the speech which she understood and loved. She sat in cafés and lazily watched men and women playing bezique at the small tables as they sipped greenish drinks from tall glasses. Shamelessly she eavesdropped on conversations regarding the merits of Anatole France as a writer whose work would live, whether the poetry of Mallarmé or Villon were to be esteemed as highly as some would have it, whether there was any city in the world, past or present or future, which had, has or might have the charm of Paris, whether there had ever been an artist who ranked with Yvette Guilbert. All, all these Mimi loved, not alone because in these varied scenes she could forget her own perplexities, but because they were lovable and exotic and charming in themselves. …