self to be consistently late at both ends, and the shade of Benjamin Franklin, who had loved his France as much as Grover was learning to love it, despite its concealed weapons, would wink a condoning eye.
But three weeks of vacation were awaiting him, and he spent them at Biarritz in August, and repaired promptly to the villa which Floss maintained at that resort. Despite the ugly proximity to San Sebastian,—a fact he had quite overlooked when accepting the invitation—he saw no sign of Olga and her Spaniard, no sign of the Spaniard's abandoned Marchesa; indeed Floss seemed to have culled a fresh bouquet of noxious human blooms, and her cool, breezy drawing-rooms were alive with riff-raff: actresses with scratchy, alcoholic voices; well-tailored gigolos with their eyes on the main chance; counts and marquises who had come by their titles in ways that nobody was sufficiently interested to challenge; cinema stars who walked out in the hope of waylaying the King of Spain; and lewd old men who had nothing left but their eyes and their pocketbooks.
Grover gave the story a rest and spent a good part of his vacation in a luxurious coma. It surprised him to find that now, incapable of being disturbed in his notions of how life should behave, he moved in the half world with an ease that had never been possible in the days when he had been on the watch for miracles; and this assurance served as a handle by which he was drawn into conversations and excursions, made
