blue with bunny-rabbit clouds."

At least a few in the Avenue's flower-garden of pretty debutantes in
pairs and young university men with expensive leather-laced tan boots
were echoing Ruth in gay, new clothes.

"I wonder who they all are; they look like an aristocracy, useless
but made of the very best materials," said Carl.

"They're like maids of honor and young knights, disguised in modern
costumes! They're charming!"

"Charmingly useless," insisted our revolutionary, but he did not sound
earnest. It was too great a day for earnestness about anything less
great than joy and life; a day for shameless luxuriating in the sun,
and for wearing bright things. In shop windows with curtains of fluted
silk were silver things and jade; satin gowns and shoe-buckles of
rhinestones. The sleek motor-cars whisked by in an incessant line; the
traffic policemen nodded familiarly to hansom-drivers; pools on the
asphalt mirrored the delicate sky, and at every corner the breeze
tasted of spring.

Carl bought for her Yeats's poems, tucked it under his arm, and they
trotted off. In Madison Square they saw a gallant and courtly old man
with military shoulders and pink cheeks, a debonair gray mustache, and
a smile of unquenchable youth, greeting April with a narcissus in his
buttonhole. He was feeding the sparrows with crumbs and smiled to see
one of them fly off, carrying a long wisp of hay, bustling away to
build for himself and his sparrow bride a bungalow in the foot-hills
of the Metropolitan Tower.

"I love that old man!" exclaimed Ruth. "I do wish we could pick him up
and take him with us. I dare you to go over and say, 'I prithee, sir,
of thy good will come thou forthfaring with two vagabonds who do quest
high and low the land of Nowhere.' Something like that. Go on, Carl,
be brave. Pretend you're brave as an aviator. Perhaps he has a map of
Arcadia. Go ask him."

"Afraid to. Besides, he might monopolize you."

"He'll go with us, without his knowing it, anyway. Isn't it strange
how you know people, perfect strangers, from seeing them once, without
even speaking to them? You know them the rest of your life and play
games with them."

The Maison Epinay you must quest long, but great is your reward if you
find it. Here is no weak remembrance of a lost Paris, but a
French-Canadian's desire to express what he believes Paris must be;
therefore a super-Paris, all in brown velvet and wicker tables, and at
the back a long window