ouring
audience with the midnight tides of wayfarers surging north and south.

The wonder and the romance of the play were still warm and vital, in
his imagination, infusing his thoughts with a roseate glamour of
unreality, wherein all things were strangely possible. The iridescent
imagery of the Arabian Nights of his boyhood (who has forgotten the
fascination of those three fat old volumes of crabbed type,
illuminated with their hundreds of cramped old wood-cuts?) had in a
scant three hours been recreated for him by Knoblauch's fantastic
drama with its splendid investment of scene and costume, its admirable
histrionic interpretation, and the robust yet exquisitely tempered
artistry of Otis Skinner. For three hours he had forgotten his lowly
world, had lived on the high peaks of romance, breathing only their
rare atmosphere that never was on land or sea.

Difficult he found it now, to divest his thoughts of that
enthrallment, to descend to cold and sober reality, to remember he was
a clerk, his companion a shop-girl, rather than a Prince disguised as
Calander esquiring a Princess dedicated to Fatal Enchantment--that
Kismet was a quaint fallacy, one with that whimsical conceit of Orient
fatalism which assigns to each and every man his Day of Days, wherein
he shall range the skies and plumb the abyss of his Destiny,
alternately its lord and its puppet.

But presently, with an effort, blinking, he pulled his wits together;
and a traffic policeman creating a favourable opening, the two
scurried across and plunged into the comparative obscurity of West
Thirty-eighth Street: sturdy George and his modest Violet already a
full block in advance.

Discovering this circumstance by the glimmer through the shadows of
Violet's conspicuously striped black-and-white taffeta, P. Sybarite
commented charitably upon their haste.

"If we hurry we might catch up," suggested Molly Lessing.

"I don't miss 'em much," he admitted, without offering to mend the
pace.

She laughed softly.

"Are they really in love?"

"George is," replied P. Sybarite, after taking thought.

"You mean she isn't?"

"To blush unseen is Violet's idea of nothing to do--not, at least,
when one is a perfect thirty-eight and possesses a good digestion and
an infinite capacity for amusement _a la carte_."

"That is to say--?" the girl prompted.

"Violet will marry well, if at all."

"Not Mr. Bross, then?"

"Nor any other poor man. I don't say she doesn't