almost have said that
he tried to avoid her. Mary took a course of tango lessons, and urged
her mother to do the same. Even Orson J. noticed it.

"Look here," he said, in kindly protest. "Aren't you getting pretty
thick with this jigger?"

"Sociological study, Dad. I'm all right."

"Yeh, you're all right. But how about him?"

"He's all right, too."

The gigolo resisted Mary's unmaidenly advances, and yet, when he was
with her, he seemed sometimes to forget to look sombre and blank and
remote. They seemed to have a lot to say to each other. Mary talked
about America a good deal. About her home town ... "and big elms and
maples and oaks in the yard ... the Fox River valley ... Middle West ...
Normal Avenue ... Cass Street ... Fox River paper mills...."

She talked in French and English. The gigolo confessed, one day, to
understanding some English, though he seemed to speak none. After that
Mary, when very much in earnest, or when enthusiastic, spoke in her
native tongue altogether. She claimed an intense interest in European
after-war conditions, in reconstruction, in the attitude toward life of
those millions of young men who had actually participated in the
conflict. She asked questions that might have been considered
impertinent, not to say nervy.

"Now you," she said, brutally, "are a person of some education,
refinement, and background. Yet you are content to dance around in
these--these--well, back home a chap might wash dishes in a cheap
restaurant or run an elevator in an east side New York loft building,
but he'd never----"

A very faint dull red crept suddenly over the pallor of the gigolo's
face. They were sitting out on a bench on the promenade, facing the
ocean (in direct defiance on Mary's part of all rules of conduct of
respectable girls toward gigolos). Mary Hubbell had said rather brusque
things before. But now, for the first time, the young man defended
himself faintly.

"For us," he replied in his exquisite French, "it is finished. For us
there is nothing. This generation, it is no good. I am no good. They are
no good." He waved a hand in a gesture that included the promenaders,
the musicians in the cafes, the dancers, the crowds eating and drinking
at the little tables lining the walk.

"What rot!" said Mary Hubbell, briskly. "They probably said exactly the
same thing in Asia after Alexander had got through with 'em. I suppose
there was such dancing and general devilment in Macedonia that