I thought possibly she desired to see our coupons, so I hauled them out and exhibited them.  She shook her head at that and gabbled faster than ever.  It next occurred to me that perhaps she wanted to furnish us with programs and was asking in advance for the money with which to pay for them.  I explained to her that I already secured programs from her friend with the mustache.  I did this mainly in English, but partly in French—­at least I employed the correct French word for program, which is programme.  To prove my case I pulled the two programs from my pocket and showed them to her.  She continued to shake her head with great emphasis, babbling on at an increased speed.  The situation was beginning to verge on the embarrassing when a light dawned on me.  She wanted a tip, that was it!  She had not done anything to earn a tip that I could see; and unless one had been reared in the barbering business she was not particularly attractive to look on, and even then only in a professional aspect; but I tipped her and bade her begone, and straightway she bewent, satisfied and smiling.  From that moment on I knew my book.  When in doubt I tipped one person—­the person nearest to me.  When in deep doubt I tipped two or more persons.  And all was well.

On the next evening but one I had another lesson, which gave me further insight into the habits and customs of these gay and gladsome Parisians.  We were completing a round of the all-night cafes and cabarets.  There were four of us.  Briefly, we had seen the Dead Rat, the Abbey, the Bal Tabarin the Red Mill, Maxim’s, and the rest of the lot to the total number of perhaps ten or twelve.  We had listened to bad singing, looked on bad dancing, sipped gingerly at bad drinks, and nibbled daintily at bad food; and the taste of it all was as grit and ashes in our mouths.  We had learned for ourselves that the much-vaunted gay life of Paris was just as sad and sordid and sloppy and unsavory as the so-called gay life of any other city with a lesser reputation for gay life and gay livers.  A scrap of the gristle end of the New York Tenderloin; a suggestion of a certain part of New Orleans; a short cross section of the Levee, in Chicago; a dab of the Barbary Coast of San Francisco in its old, unexpurgated days; a touch of Piccadilly Circus in London, after midnight, with a top dressing of Gehenna the Unblest—­it had seemed to us a compound of these ingredients, with a distinctive savor of what was essentially Gallic permeating through it like garlic through a stew.  We had had enough.  Even though we had attended only as onlookers and seekers after local color, we felt that we had a-plenty of onlooking and entirely too much of local color; we felt that we should all go into retreat for a season of self-purification to rid our persons of the one and take a bath in formaldehyde to rinse our memories clean of the other.  But the ruling spirit of the expedition pointed out that the evening would not be complete without a stop at a cafe that had—­so he said—­an international reputation for its supposed sauciness and its real Bohemian atmosphere, whatever that might be.  Overcome by his argument we piled into a cab and departed thither.