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Back with the tables all the fellows round Farquharson for me and Smith for you, and then to it, Romarin!... And you really don't remember what it was all about?..." Romarin had remembered. His face was not the face of the philosophic master of Life now. "You said she shouldn't little Pattie Hines you know you said she shouldn't "
It shocked Romarin a little; he had hardly looked to see certain things so accentuated by the passage of time. Romarin's own brow was high and bald and benign, and his beard was like a broad shield of silver. "You're glad, are you?" said Marsden, as they sat down facing one another. "Well, I'm glad to be seen with you. It'll revive my credit a bit.
"Then you've changed," said Romarin wondering, however, in his secret heart whether Marsden had changed very much in that respect after all. Marsden gave a short honk of a laugh. "You didn't suppose I hadn't changed, did you?" Then he leaned suddenly forward. "This is rather a mistake, Romarin rather a mistake," he said. "What is?" "This our meeting again. Quite a mistake." Romarin sighed.
Romarin had thrown up his handsome head. "Well, well!" he murmured incredulously. "Why 'well, well'?" Marsden demanded.... "But, of course, you never did and never will know what I meant." "By Romance? ... No, I can't say that I did; but as I conceived it, it was something that began in appetite and ended in diabetes." "Not philosophic, eh?" Marsden inquired, picking up a chicken bone.
Either leaned back in his chair, surveying the other. "You're a perverse devil still," was Romarin's thought. Marsden's, apparently, was of nothing but the whiskey and soda the waiter had gone to fetch. Romarin was inclined to look askance at a man who could follow up a gin and bitters with three or four whiskeys and soda without turning a hair. It argued the seasoned cask.
"Sing us the last verse " "Dans ce jardin du Roi A pris sa reposee, Cueillant le romarin La vande bouton nee " The last notes were but faint vibrations, coming from a lengthening distance. "Ah!" and Monsieur Paul breathed a sigh. "They don't care about singing. They are doing it all the time they are so much in love. The fathers' lawsuit ended only last month.
Romarin was taking the rind from a pear with a table-knife, and Marsden had declined port in favour of a small golden liqueur of brandy. Every seat in the restaurant was now occupied, and the proprietor himself had brought his finest cigarettes and cigars. The waiter poured out the coffee, and departed with the apparatus in one hand and his napkin in the other.
The clock had a peculiar chime, a rather elaborate one, ending inconclusively on the dominant and followed after an unusually long interval by the stroke of the hour itself. Not until its last vibration had become too subtle for his ear had Romarin resumed the occupation that the pealing of the hour had interrupted.
If all reports were true, Marsden had not made very much of his life in the way of worldly success, and Romarin, sorry to hear it, had wished he could give him a leg-up. Even a good man cannot do much when the current of his life sets against him in a tide of persistent ill-luck, and Romarin, honoured and successful, yet knew that he had been one of the lucky ones....
I don't say you haven't earned it; I admire your painting; but it's not that. I want to know what it feels like to be up there where you are." It was a childish question, and Romarin felt foolish in trying to answer it. Such things were the things the adoring aureoled youngster a table or two away would have liked to ask.
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