understood things which no other mortal man could ever know or understand.
“I should prefer not to talk about it,” he said very quietly, and by these words Eugene understood that some tragic and unutterable event had now irrevocably sundered Starwick from Egan—though what that event might be, he saw it was not given him to know.
Immediately, however, in his old, casual, and engaging fashion, speaking between lips that barely moved, Starwick said:
“Look! What are you doing now? Is there any place you have to go?”
“No. I was just going in here. But I suppose it’s too late now, anyway.”
At this moment, indeed, they could hear the bells ringing in the museum, and the voices of the guards, crying impatiently:
“On ferme! On ferme, messieurs!”—and the people began to pour out in streams.
“Ace,” said Starwick, “they’re closing now. Besides,” he added wearily, “I shouldn’t think it would matter to you, anyway…. God!” he cried suddenly, in a high, almost womanish accent of passionate conviction, “what junk! What mountains and oceans of junk! And so bad!” he cried passionately, in his strange, unearthly tone. “So incredibly and impossibly bad. In that whole place there are just three things worth seeing—but they!”—his voice was high again with passionate excitement—“they are unspeakably beautiful, Eugene! God!” he cried, high and passionate again, “how beautiful they are! How utterly, impossibly beautiful!” Then with a resumption of his quiet, matter-of-fact tone he said, “You must come here with me some time. I will show them to you…. Look!” he said, in his casual tone again, “will you come to the Régence with me and have a drink?”
The whole earth seemed to come to life at once. Now that Starwick was here, this unfamiliar world, in whose alien life he had struggled like a drowning swimmer, became in a moment wonderful and good. The feeling of numb, nameless terror, rootless desolation, the intolerable sick anguish of homelessness, insecurity, and homesickness, against which he had fought since coming to Paris, and which he had been ashamed and afraid to admit, was now instantly banished. Even the strange dark faces of the French as they streamed past no longer seemed strange, but friendly and familiar, and the moist and languorous air, the soft thick greyness of the skies which had seemed to press down on his naked
