tween himself and the other boys
of his ilk there was little or no professional comradeship. A weird lot
they were, young, though their faces were strangely lacking in the look
of youth. All of them had been in the war. Most of them had been
injured. There was Aubin, the Frenchman. The right side of Aubin's face
was rather startlingly handsome in its Greek perfection. It was like a
profile chiselled. The left side was another face--the same, and yet not
the same. It was as though you saw the left side out of drawing, or
blurred, or out of focus. It puzzled you--shocked you. The left side of
Aubin's face had been done over by an army surgeon who, though deft and
scientific, had not had a hand expert as that of the Original Sculptor.
Then there was Mazzetti, the Roman. He parted his hair on the wrong
side, and under the black wing of it was a deep groove into which you
could lay a forefinger. A piece of shell had plowed it neatly. The
Russian boy who called himself Orloff had the look in his eyes of one
who has seen things upon which eyes never should have looked. He smoked
constantly and ate, apparently, not at all. Among these there existed a
certain unwritten code and certain unwritten signals.

You did not take away the paying partner of a fellow gigolo. If in too
great demand you turned your surplus partners over to gigolos
unemployed. You did not accept less than ten francs (they all broke this
rule). Sometimes Gedeon Gore made ten francs a day, sometimes twenty,
sometimes fifty, infrequently a hundred. Sometimes not enough to pay for
his one decent meal a day. At first he tried to keep fit by walking a
certain number of miles daily along the ocean front. But usually he was
too weary to persist in this. He did not think at all. He felt nothing.
Sometimes, down deep, deep in a long-forgotten part of his being a voice
called feebly, plaintively to the man who had been Giddy Gory. But he
shut his ears and mind and consciousness and would not listen.

The American girls were best, the gigolos all agreed, and they paid
well, though they talked too much. Gedeon Gore was a favourite among
them. They thought he was so foreign looking, and kind of sad and stern
and everything. His French, fluent, colloquial, and bewildering, awed
them. They would attempt to speak to him in halting and hackneyed
phrases acquired during three years at Miss Pence's Select School at
Hastings-on-the-Hudson. At the cost of about a thousand dollars