men, solid, bronzed, laughing rather wickedly together. Ben drew back,
afraid of what he might overhear, but it turned out to be no very
guilty secret. "My dear fellow," one was saying, "I gave him a stroke
a hole, and he's twenty years younger than I am--well, fifteen anyhow.
The trouble with these young men is that they lack--"

Ben never heard what it was that young men lacked.

Next came a boy and a girl, talking eagerly, the girl's hand
gesticulating at her round, red lips. Ben had no scruples in
overhearing them--theirs appeared to be the universal secret. But here
again he was wrong. She was saying: "Round and round--not up and down.
My dentist says that if you always brush them round and round--"

Then two young men--boys, with cigarettes drooping from their lips;
they were saying, "I haven't pitched a game since before the war, but
he said to go in and get that Tiverton fellow, and so--" Ben saw that
he was in the presence of the hero of the late game. He forgave him,
too.

As a matter of fact, he had never given the fashionable world
enough attention to hate it. He knew that Leo Klein derived a very
revivifying antagonism from reading about it, and often bought himself
an entrance to the opera partly because he loved music, but partly,
Ben always thought, because he liked to look up at the boxes and hate
the occupants for their jewels and inattention. But Ben watched the
spectacle with as much detachment as he would have watched a spring
dance among the Indians.

And then suddenly his detachment melted away, for a lovely girl came