wheezing hurdy-gurdy played by a white bearded ancient who at the end of
each tune refreshed himself with a draught from a chope of beer on the
ground by his side, while a tiny anaemic girl went round gathering sous in a
shell. When the music stopped you could hear the whir and the click of the
bowls in an adjoining dusty and rugged alley and the harsh excited cries
of the players. During these intervals the serving people in an absent way
would scatter an occasional carafe-full of water on the dancing floor to
lay the dust.

Young Lackaday hung hesitatingly on the outskirts under the wooden archway
that was at once the entrance and the sign-board. The music had ended. The
tables were packed. He felt very thirsty and longed to enter and drink some
of the beer which looked so cool in the long glasses surmounted by its
half inch of white froth--inviting as sea-foam. Shyness held him. These
prosperous, care-free bourgeois, almost indistinguishable one from the
other by racial characteristics, and himself a tragic failure in life and
physically unique among men, were worlds apart. It had never occurred to
him before that he could find himself anywhere in France where the people
were not his people. He felt heart-brokenly alien.

Presently the hurdy-gurdy started the ghostly tinkling of the _Il
Bacio_ waltz, and the ingenuous couples of Avignon rose and began to
dance. The thirst-driven Lackaday plucked up courage, and strode to
a deserted wooden table. He ordered beer. It was brought. He sipped
luxuriously. One tells one's thirst to be patient, when one has to think of
one's sous. He was half-way through when two girls, young and flushed from
dancing together, flung themselves down on the opposite bench--the table
between.

"We don't disturb you, Monsieur?"