backs to his comfort, but content
beamed softly from his rimless eyeglasses. His family was out of town.
The drinks were warm; the ballet was suffering from lack of both tune
and talcum--but his family would not return until September.

Then up into the garden stumbled the man from Topaz City, Nevada. The
gloom of the solitary sightseer enwrapped him. Bereft of joy through
loneliness, he stalked with a widower's face through the halls of
pleasure. Thirst for human companionship possessed him as he panted
in the metropolitan draught. Straight to the New Yorker's table he
steered.

The New Yorker, disarmed and made reckless by the lawless atmosphere
of a roof garden, decided upon utter abandonment of his life's
traditions. He resolved to shatter with one rash, dare-devil,
impulsive, hair-brained act the conventions that had hitherto been
woven into his existence. Carrying out this radical and precipitous
inspiration he nodded slightly to the stranger as he drew nearer the
table.

The next moment found the man from Topaz City in the list of the New
Yorker's closest friends. He took a chair at the table, he gathered
two others for his feet, he tossed his broad-brimmed hat upon a
fourth, and told his life's history to his new-found pard.

The New Yorker warmed a little, as an apartment-house furnace warms
when the strawberry season begins. A waiter who came within hail in an
unguarded moment was captured and paroled on an errand to the Doctor
Wiley experimental station. The ballet was now in the midst of a
musical vagary, and danced upon the stage programmed as Bolivian
peasants, clothed in some portions of its anatomy as Norwegian
fisher maidens, in others as ladies-in-waiting of Marie Antoinette,
historically denuded in other portions so as to represent sea nymphs,
and presenting the _tout ensemble_ of a social club of Central Park
West housemaids at a fish fry.

"Been in the city long?" inquired the New Yorker, getting ready the
exact tip against the waiter's coming with large change from the bill.

"Me?" said the man from Topaz City. "Four days. Never in Topaz City,
was you?"

"I!" said the New Yorker. "I was never farther west than Eighth
Avenue. I had a brother who died on Ninth, but I met the cortege at
Eighth. There was a bunch of violets on the hearse, and the undertaker
mentioned the incident to avoid mistake. I cannot say that I am
familiar with the West."

"Topaz City," said the man who occupied four c