I rushed back to the tiny office M. Saint and Mademoiselle had waited, and accepted my gratitude with their usual controlled smiles and precise handshakes.
But they had blown their Gallic cover, and for the next ten days and then though all the days until I went home in September, our branch was awash with sightseeing paraphernalia.
Everyone had advice, favorite haunts, criticisms of the Alliance's choices or explanations. Paris passed through the bank's granite walls as sweetly as a June breeze through a window screen, and ever afterward the lilt of overheard French, a photograph of Sacre Coeur or the Louvre, even a monthly bank statement, recalls to me that best of all summers.
I didn't wind up in an occupation with any obvious connection to the careers I sampled during my school breaks, but I never altogether abandoned those breif professions either.
They were jobs not so much to be held as to be weighed, absorbed, and incorporated, and, collectively, they carried me forward into adult life like overlapping stairs, unfolding a particular pattern at once haphazard and inevitable.
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