fresh, salty, virile.

"This whole place gets on my nerves!" said Durkin testily. Yes, he
told himself, he was sick of it, sick of the monotony, of the idleness,
of the sullen malevolence of it all. It was gay only to the eyes; and
to him it would never seem gay again.

"Oh, that comes of not speaking the language, you know!" maintained the
other stoutly, and, at the same time, comprehensively.

He was still very young, Durkin remembered. He had toyed with art for
two winters in Paris, so scene by scene he had been able to translate
the little drama that had appeared so farcical and Frenchy to his older
countryman in exile.

Durkin's lip curled a little.

"No--it comes of knowing _life_!" he answered, with a touch of
impatience. He felt the gulf that separated their two oddly diverse
lives--the one the youth eager to dip into experience, the other a
fugitive from a many-sided past that still shadowed and menaced him.
He listened with only half an ear as the Chicagoan expounded some glib
and ancient principle about the fairy tale being even truer than truth
itself.

"Why," he continued argumentatively, "everything that happened in that
play might happen here, tonight, to you or me!"

"Rubbish!" ejaculated Durkin, brusquely, remembering how lonely he must
indeed have been thus to attach himself to this youth of the studios.
But he added, as a matter of form: "You think, then, that life today
_is_ as romantic as it once was?"

"_Mon Dieu_!" cried the other. "Look at Monte Carlo here! Of course
it is. It's more crowded, more rapid; it holds _more_ romance. We
didn't put it all off, you know, with doublet and hose!"

"No, of course not," answered Durkin absently. Life, at that moment,
was confronting him so grimly, so flat and sterile and uncompromising
in its secret exactions, that he had no heart to theorize about it.

"And a thing isn't romantic just because it's moss-grown!" continued
the child of the studios, warming to his subject. "It's romantic when
we've emotionalized it, when we've _felt_ it, when it's hit home with
us, as it were!"

"If it doesn't hit too hard!" qualified the older man.

"For instance," maintained the young Chicagoan, once more proffering
his cigarette-case to Durkin, "for instance, take that big Mercedes
touring-car with the canopy top, coming down through the crowd there.
You'll agree, at first sight, that such things mean good-bye to the
mounted knight, to chivalry, an