Orleans, yet their clothes, their perfume, their rings, even their talk with its strange allusions to Brancusi, Stravinsky, Pitoeff, proclaimed them bafflingly different. The hostess was a young woman with hard green eyes and a Hollywood manner. Grover thought of the recruiting signs he had seen near the Boston waterfront: Join Uncle Sam's navy and see the world. Verily!
People coming and going, the purplish taste of his byrrh à l'eau growing gradually sweeter, the afternoon shadows making fantastic patterns, the leaves whispering overhead, the whole scene gradually losing its hostile character,—something more was happening to him. The little song with a twist in its rhythm was being played, badly, by an itinerant musician. The laughter, the tinkle of ice, the scurrying of insufficient waiters, the greetings tossed here and there, the warmth of the air, the blend of unknown scents,—he heard someone saying that the man who had just passed, bare head, blue shirt, and walking stick, wrote snooty articles for the American Mercury and had stolen himself a new wife,—he was slipping into a pleasant abyss of loneliness, a new kind, for he was yearning for something he couldn't have defined if his life had depended on it. All these people, however impossible they might be, possessed the secret that eluded him, Even the most self-conscious of the Americans within his range of vision had discarded an inhibition which still ham-
