a cigarette?"

"If you please--a cigarette!" Max's voice had the quick note, his eyes
the swift light that spoke excitement. "_Mon ami_, I like this place! I
like it! And I wonder who painted that?" He indicated a picture that
hung upon the wall beside them.

"I don't know! Some chap who used to frequent the place in his unknown
days. We can ask Fruvier."

"It is clever."

"It is."

"It has imagination."

They both looked at the picture--a study in black and white, showing an
attic room, with a _pierrette_ seated disconsolate upon a bed, a
_pierrot_ gazing through a window.

"_Pierrot_ seeking the moon, eh?"

Max nodded.

"Yes. It has imagination--and also technique!"

But their criticism was interrupted; a piano was opened at the farther
end of the room by an individual affecting the unkempt hair and
velveteen coat of past Bohemianism, who seated himself and ran his
fingers over the keys as though he alone occupied the room.

At this very informal signal, the curtain rose upon a ridiculously small
stage, and an insignificant, nervous-looking man stepped toward the
footlights at the same moment that M. Fruvier and his followers entered
and seated themselves in a row, their backs to the wall.

This appearance of the proprietor was the sole meed of interest offered
to the singer, the audience continuing to smoke, to sip, even to peruse
the evening papers with stoic indifference.

The song began--a long and unamusing ditty, topical in its points. Here
and there a smile showed that it did not pass unheard, and as the singer
disappeared a faint _roulade_ of applause came from the back of the
room.

Max turned to his companion.

"But I believed the Parisians to be all excitement! What an audience!
Like the dead!"

"They are excitable when something excites them."

"Then they dislike this song?"

"Oh no! 'Not bad!' they'd say if you asked them; but they're not here to
be excited--they're not here to waste enthusiasm. Like ourselves, they
have worked and have eaten, and are enjoying an hour's repose. The song
is part of the hour--as inevitable as the _bock_ and the cigar, and you
can't expect a smoker to wax eloquent over a familiar weed."

"How strange! How interesting!" The boy looked round the scattered
groups that formed to his young eyes another side-show in the vast
theatre of life.

No one heeded his interest. The women, young and elderly alike,
conversed with their escorts and sipped their l