chorus girl or at a man painting a
liver pill sign. They will form as deep a cordon around a man with
a club-foot as they will around a balked automobile. They have the
furor rubberendi. They are optical gluttons, feasting and fattening
on the misfortunes of their fellow beings. They gloat and pore and
glare and squint and stare with their fishy eyes like goggle-eyed
perch at the book baited with calamity.

It would seem that Cupid would find these ocular vampires too cold
game for his calorific shafts, but have we not yet to discover an
immune even among the Protozoa? Yes, beautiful Romance descended upon
two of this tribe, and love came into their hearts as they crowded
about the prostrate form of a man who had been run over by a brewery
wagon.

William Pry was the first on the spot. He was an expert at such
gatherings. With an expression of intense happiness on his features,
he stood over the victim of the accident, listening to his groans as
if to the sweetest music. When the crowd of spectators had swelled to
a closely packed circle William saw a violent commotion in the crowd
opposite him. Men were hurled aside like ninepins by the impact of
some moving body that clove them like the rush of a tornado. With
elbows, umbrella, hat-pin, tongue, and fingernails doing their duty,
Violet Seymour forced her way through the mob of onlookers to the
first row. Strong men who even had been able to secure a seat on
the 5.30 Harlem express staggered back like children as she bucked
centre. Two large lady spectators who had seen the Duke of Roxburgh
married and had often blocked traffic on Twenty-third Street fell
back into the second row with ripped shirtwaists when Violet had
finished with them. William Pry loved her at first sight.

The ambulance removed the unconscious agent of Cupid. William and
Violet remained after the crowd had dispersed. They were true
Rubberers. People who leave the scene of an accident with the
ambulance have not genuine caoutchouc in the cosmogony of their
necks. The delicate, fine flavour of the affair is to be had only
in the after-taste--in gloating over the spot, in gazing fixedly at
the houses opposite, in hovering there in a dream more exquisite
than the opium-eater's ecstasy. William Pry and Violet Seymour were
connoisseurs in casualties. They knew how to extract full enjoyment
from every incident.

Presently they looked at each other. Violet had a brown birthmark on
her neck as large as