RODUCTION

HOW WE CAME INTO THE GARDEN

It was by a strange irony of Fate that we found ourselves reunited for
a summer's outing, in a French garden, in July, 1914.

With the exception of the Youngster, we had hardly met since the days
of our youth.

We were a party of unattached people, six men, two women, your humble
servant, and the Youngster, who was an outsider.

With the exception of the latter, we had all gone to school or college
or dancing class together, and kept up a sort of superficial
acquaintance ever since--that sort of relation in which people know
something of one another's opinions and absolutely nothing of one
another's real lives.

There was the Doctor, who had studied long in Germany, and become an
authority on mental diseases, developed a distaste for therapeutics,
and a passion for research and the laboratory. There was the Lawyer,
who knew international law as he knew his Greek alphabet, and hated a
court room. There was the Violinist, who was known the world over in
musical sets,--everywhere, except in the concert room. There was the
Journalist, who had travelled into almost as many queer places as
Richard Burton, seen more wars, and followed more callings. There was
the Sculptor, the fame of whose greater father had almost paralyzed a
pair of good modeller's hands. There was the Critic, whose friends
believed that in him the world had lost a great romancer, but whom a
combination of hunger and laziness, and a proneness to think that
nothing not genius was worth while, had condemned to be a mere
breadwinner, but a breadwinner who squeezed a lot out of life, and who
fervently believed that in his next incarnation he would really be
"it." Then there was "Me," and of the other two women--one was a
Trained Nurse, and the other a Divorcee, and--well, none of us really
knew just what she had become, but we knew that she was very rich, and
very handsome, and had a leaning toward some sort of new religion. As
for the Youngster--he was the son of an old chum of the Doctor--his
ward, in fact--and his hobby was flying.

Our reunion, after so many years, was a rather pretty story.

In the summer of 1913, the Doctor and the Divorcee, who had lost sight
of one another for twenty years, met by chance in Paris. Her
ex-husband had been a college friend of the Doctor. They saw a great
deal of one another in the lazy way that people who really love
France, and are done sightseeing, can do.

One day i