Sitting in an outdoor café, Jake picks up a prostitute named Georgette and they ride a horse-drawn cab into Paris’s Latin Quarter. Sharing dinner at a restaurant there, Jake and Georgette are discovered by a group of North Americans: Robert Cohn and Frances, Jake’s friend Braddocks and his wife, and some others. The group goes dancing at a nightclub, where a woman named Brett (also known as Lady Ashley, because she is a titled British aristocrat) appears in the company of a group of homosexual men. Cohn is obviously attracted to Brett, who seems to have been involved with Jake at some time in the past. (Jake admits to the reader that her arrival with the gay men makes him angry, while Brett seems jealous of Georgette.) Brett suggests to Jake that they leave the club. They hail a cab, and Brett tells Jake she has been miserable.
