mechanically, but Rue Carew dropped her white
face on the Princess Naia's shoulder as though suddenly fatigued.

CHAPTER XXVII

FROM FOUR TO FIVE

The Princess Mistchenka and Rue Carew had retired to their respective
rooms for that hour between four and five in the afternoon, which the
average woman devotes to cat-naps or to that aimless feminine fussing
which must ever remain a mystery to man.

The afternoon had turned very warm; Neeland, in his room, lay on the
lounge in his undershirt and trousers, having arrived so far toward
bathing and changing his attire.

No breeze stirred the lattice blinds hanging over both open windows;
the semi-dusk of the room was pierced here and there by slender shafts
of sunlight which lay almost white across the carpet and striped the
opposite wall; the rue Soleil d'Or was very silent in the July
afternoon.

And Neeland lay there thinking about all that had happened to him and
trying to bring it home to himself and make it seem plausible and
real; and could not.

For even now the last ten days of his life seemed like a story he had
read concerning someone else. Nor did it seem to him that he
personally had known all those people concerned in this wild,
exaggerated, grotesque story. They, too, took their places on the
printed page, appearing, lingering, disappearing, reappearing, as
chapter succeeded chapter in a romance too obvious, too palpably
sensational to win the confidence and credulity of a young man of
today.

Fed to repletion on noisy contemporary fiction, his finer perception
blunted by the daily and raucous yell of the New York press, his
imagination too long over-strained by Broadway drama and now flaccid
and incapable of further response to its leering or shrieking appeal,
the din of twentieth-century art fell on nerveless ears and on a brain
benumbed and sceptical.

And so when everything that he had found grotesque, illogical,
laboured, obvious, and clamorously redundant in literature and the
drama began to happen and continued to happen in real life to him--and
went on happening and involving himself and others all around him in
the pleasant July sunshine of 1914, this young man, made
intellectually _blase_, found himself without sufficient capacity to
comprehend it.

There was another matter with which his mind was struggling as he lay
there, his head cradled on one elbow, watching the thin blue spirals
from his cigarette mount straight to the ce