one.

For underneath all the natural beauty of Monaco Durkin had been
continuously haunted by the sense of something unclean and leprous and
corroding. Under its rouge and roses, at every turn, he found the
insidious taint.

And more than ever, tonight, he had a sense of witnessing Destiny
stalking through those soft gardens, of Tragedy skulking about its
regal stairways.

For it was there, in the midst of those unassisting and enervating
surroundings, he dimly felt, that he himself was to choose one of two
strangely divergent paths. Yet he knew, in a way, that his decision
had already been forced upon him, that the dice had been cast and
counted. He had been trying to sweep back the rising sea with a broom;
he had been trying to fight down that tangled and tortuous past which
still claimed him as its own. And now all that remained for him was to
slip quietly and unprotestingly into the current which clawed and
gnawed at his feet. He had been tried too long; the test, from the
first, had been too crucial. He might, in time, even find some
solacing thought in the fitness between the act and its
environment--here he could fling himself into an obliterating Niagara,
not of falling waters, but of falling men and women. Yes, it was a
stage all prepared and set for the mean and sordid and ever recurring
tragedy of which he was to be the puppet. For close about him seethed
and boiled, as in no other place in the world, all the darker and more
despicable passions of humanity. He inwardly recalled the types with
which his stage was embellished; the fellow puppets of that gilded and
arrogant and idle world, the curled and perfumed princes, the waxed and
watching _boulevardiers_ side by side with virginal and unconscious
American girls, pallid and impoverished grand dukes in the wake of
painted but wary Parisians, stiff-mustached and mysterious Austrian
counts lowering at doughty and indignant Englishwomen; bejeweled beys
and pashas brushing elbows with unperturbed New England school-teachers
astray from Cook's; monocled thieves and gamblers and princelings,
jaded tourists and skulking parasites--and always the disillusioned and
waiting women.

"That play got on your nerves, didn't it?" suddenly asked the lazy,
half-careless voice at his side. Durkin and the young Chicagoan were
in the musky-smelling Promenade by this time, and up past the stands at
the sea-front the breath of the Mediterranean blew in their faces,