drop and wings of a playhouse might. Its sense of
casual and careless calm, too, seemed to him only the rest of a
spinning top. Its unrelated continuities of appeal, its incessant
coquetries of attire, its panoramic beauty of mountain and cape and
sea-front, its parade of corporeal and egotistic pleasures, its
primordial and undisguised appeal to the carnival spirit, its frank,
exotic festivity, its volatile and almost too vital atmosphere, and,
above all, its glowing and over-odorous gardens and flowerbeds, its
overcrowded and grimly Dionysian Promenade, its murmurous and alluring
restaurants on steep little boulevards--it was all a blind, Durkin
argued with himself, to drape and smother the cynical misery of the
place. Underneath all its flaunting and waving softnesses life ran
grim and hard--as grim and hard as the solid rock that lay so close
beneath its jonquils and violets and its masking verdure of mimosa and
orange and palm.

He hated it, he told himself in his tragic and newborn austerity of
spirit, as any right-minded and clean-living man should hate paper
roses or painted faces. Every foot of it, that night, seemed a muffled
and mediate insult to intelligence. The too open and illicit
invitation of its confectionery-like halls, the insipidly emphatic
pretentiousness of the Casino itself--Durkin could never quite decide
whether it reminded him of a hurriedly finished exposition building or
of a child's birthday cake duly iced and bedecked--the tinsel glory,
the hackneyed magnificence, of its legitimatized and ever-orderly
gaming dens, the eternal claws of greed beneath the voluptuous velvet
of indolence--it all combined to fill his soul with a sense of hot
revolt, as had so often before happened during the past long and lonely
days, when he had looked up at the soft green of olive and eucalyptus
and then down at the intense turquoise curve of the harbor fringed with
white foam.

Always, at such times, he had marveled that man could turn one of
earth's most beautiful gardens into one of crime's most crowded haunts.
The ironic injustice of it embittered him; it left him floundering in a
sea of moral indecision at a time when he most needed some forlorn
belief in the beneficence of natural law. It outraged his
incongruously persistent demand for fair play, just as the sight of the
jauntily clad gunners shooting down pigeons on that tranquil and Edenic
little grass-plot at the foot of the Promontory had d