yed. He was stationed in Paris, and
it was his invariable custom to dine sumptuously at one of the more
expensive restaurants.

This odd combination of service and sybaritism was not much to my
liking, seeming to indicate a curious lack of imaginative sympathy with
the victims of that triumphing Misery he was enlisted to combat;
nevertheless, I had properly appreciated my dinner. It is impossible not
to appreciate a well-ordered dinner, _chez_ Durant, where wartime
limitations seemed never to weigh very heavily upon the delicately
imagined good cheer. True, the cost of this good cheer was fantastic,
and I shuddered a little as certain memories of refugee hordes at Evian
intruded themselves between our golden mouthfuls; but the bouquet of a
fine mellowed Burgundy was in my nostrils and soon proved anaesthetic to
conscience. And Arthur Dalton is a good table companion; his easy flow
of conversation quite as mellow often as the wine he knows so well how
to select. But that night, though I did my poor best to emulate him, I
fear he did not find an equal combination of the soothing and the
stimulating in me.

Perhaps it was because I had bored him that I was destined before we
parted to catch a rather startling glimpse of a new Arthur Dalton, new
at least to me; a person wholly different from the amusing man of the
world I had long, but so casually, known.

"Hunt," he said unexpectedly, over a final glass of old yellow
Chartreuse, a liquor almost unobtainable at any price, "you've changed a
lot since our days here together." We had seen something of each other
once in Paris, years before, during a fine month of spring weather; it
was the year after my wife had left me. "A lot," he repeated; "and I
wish I could say for the better. You've aged, man, before you're old.
You've let life, somehow, get on your nerves, depress you. Suffered your
genial spirits to rot, as the poet says. That's foolish. It's a kind of
defeat--acceptance of defeat. Now my philosophy is always to stay on
top--where the cream lies. Somebody's going to get it if you and I
don't, eh? Well, I'm having my share. I don't want more and I'm damned
if I'll take less. Anything wrong with that point of view, old man? I'd
be willing to swear it used to be yours!"

"Never quite, I think," was my answer; "at least I never formulated it
that way. I took things pretty easily as they came, Dalt, and didn't
worry about reasons. I've never been a philosophical person,