untouched. Indeed they were other men's adventures, not mine. Except
for a little habit of responsibility which I had acquired they had not
matured me. I was as young as before. Inconceivably young--still
beautifully unthinking--infinitely receptive.

You may believe that I was not thinking of Don Carlos and his fight for a
kingdom. Why should I? You don't want to think of things which you meet
every day in the newspapers and in conversation. I had paid some calls
since my return and most of my acquaintance were legitimists and
intensely interested in the events of the frontier of Spain, for
political, religious, or romantic reasons. But I was not interested.
Apparently I was not romantic enough. Or was it that I was even more
romantic than all those good people? The affair seemed to me
commonplace. That man was attending to his business of a Pretender.

On the front page of the illustrated paper I saw lying on a table near
me, he looked picturesque enough, seated on a boulder, a big strong man
with a square-cut beard, his hands resting on the hilt of a cavalry
sabre--and all around him a landscape of savage mountains. He caught my
eye on that spiritedly composed woodcut. (There were no inane
snapshot-reproductions in those days.) It was the obvious romance for
the use of royalists but it arrested my attention.

Just then some masks from outside invaded the cafe, dancing hand in hand
in a single file led by a burly man with a cardboard nose. He gambolled
in wildly and behind him twenty others perhaps, mostly Pierrots and
Pierrettes holding each other by the hand and winding in and out between
the chairs and tables: eyes shining in the holes of cardboard faces,
breasts panting; but all preserving a mysterious silence.

They were people of the poorer sort (white calico with red spots,
costumes), but amongst them there was a girl in a black dress sewn over
with gold half moons, very high in the neck and very short in the skirt.
Most of the ordinary clients of the cafe didn't even look up from their
games or papers. I, being alone and idle, stared abstractedly. The girl
costumed as Night wore a small black velvet mask, what is called in
French a "_loup_." What made her daintiness join that obviously rough
lot I can't imagine. Her uncovered mouth and chin suggested refined
prettiness.

They filed past my table; the Night noticed perhaps my fixed gaze and
throwing her body forward out of the wriggling