he gift of accommodating itself to each
man's humour. His own, at the moment, lent it a festive readiness of
welcome that might well, in a disenchanted eye, have turned to paint and
facility. So frank an appeal for participation--so outspoken a
recognition of the holiday vein in human nature--struck refreshingly on a
mind jaded by prolonged hard work in surroundings made for the discipline
of the senses. As he surveyed the white square set in an exotic coquetry
of architecture, the studied tropicality of the gardens, the groups
loitering in the foreground against mauve mountains which suggested a
sublime stage-setting forgotten in a hurried shifting of scenes--as he
took in the whole outspread effect of light and leisure, he felt a
movement of revulsion from the last few months of his life.

The New York winter had presented an interminable perspective of
snow-burdened days, reaching toward a spring of raw sunshine and furious
air, when the ugliness of things rasped the eye as the gritty wind ground
into the skin. Selden, immersed in his work, had told himself that
external conditions did not matter to a man in his state, and that cold
and ugliness were a good tonic for relaxed sensibilities. When an urgent
case summoned him abroad to confer with a client in Paris, he broke
reluctantly with the routine of the office; and it was only now that,
having despatched his business, and slipped away for a week in the south,
he began to feel the renewed zest of spectatorship that is the solace of
those who take an objective interest in life.

The multiplicity of its appeals--the perpetual surprise of its contrasts
and resemblances! All these tricks and turns of the show were upon him
with a spring as he descended the Casino steps and paused on the pavement
at its doors. He had not been abroad for seven years--and what changes
the renewed contact produced! If the central depths were untouched,
hardly a pin-point of surface remained the same. And this was the very
place to bring out the completeness of the renewal. The sublimities, the
perpetuities, might have left him as he was: but this tent pitched for a
day's revelry spread a roof of oblivion between himself and his fixed sky.

It was mid-April, and one felt that the revelry had reached its climax
and that the desultory groups in the square and gardens would soon
dissolve and re-form in other scenes. Meanwhile the last moments of the
performance seemed to gain an added brig