ster of golden
butterflies.

"Those are the slaves who sand the arena!" retorted Durkin, studying
the softly waving palms, and leaving the other a little in doubt as to
the meaning of his figure.

The younger man sighed; he was beginning to feel, doubtless, from what
different standpoints they looked out on life.

"Oh, well, you can say what you like, but this is the centre of the
world, to _my_ way of thinking!"

"The centre of--putrescence!" ejaculated Durkin. The younger man began
to laugh, with conciliatory good-nature, as he glanced appreciatively
back at the sweetmeat stateliness of the Casino front. But into the
older man's mind crept the impression that they were merely passing, in
going from crowded theatre to open garden and street, from one
playhouse to another. It all seemed to him, indeed, nothing more than
a transition of theatricalities. For that outer play-world which lay
along Monaco's three short miles of marble stairway and villa and
hillside garden appeared to him, in his mood of settled dejection, as
artificial and unnatural and unrelated as the life which he had just
seen pictured across the footlights of the over-pretty and
meringue-like little theatre.

"Well, Monte Carlo's good enough for me, all right, all right!"
persisted the young Chicagoan, as they made their way down the
lamp-hung Promenade. And he laughed with a sort of luxurious
contentment, holding out his cigarette-case as he did so.

The older man, catching a light from the proffered match, said nothing
in reply. Something in the other's betrayingly boyish laugh grated on
his nerves, though he paused, punctiliously, beside his chance-found
companion, while together they gazed down at the twinkling lights of
the bay, where the soft and violet Mediterranean lay under a soft and
violet sky, and the boatlamps were languidly swaying dots of white and
red, and the Promontory stood outlined in electric globes, like a
woman's breast threaded with pearls, the young art-student expressed
it, and the perennial, ever-cloying perfumes floated up from square and
thicket and garden.

There was an eternal menace about it, Durkin concluded. There was
something subversive and undermining and unnerving in its very
atmosphere. It gave him the impression of being always under glass.
It made him ache for the sting and bite of a New England north-easter.
It screened and shut off the actualities and perpetuities of life as
completely as the