It was unfair, too utterly unfair, he told himself, as he paced the faded carpet of his cheap hotel-room, and the mild Riviera sunlight crept in through the window-square and the serenely soft and alluring sea-air drifted in between the open shutters.
It meant that a new and purposeful path had been blazed through the tangled complexities of life for him, yet he could make no move to take advantage of it.

It meant that the door of his delivery had been swung wide, with its mockery of open and honest sunlight, and yet his feet were to remain fettered in that underworld gloom he had grown to hate.
He must still stay an unwilling prisoner in this garden of studied indolence, this playground of invalids and gamblers; he must still dawdle idly about these glittering, stagnating squares, fringing a crowd of meaningless foreigners, skulking half-fed and poorly housed about this opulent showplace of the world that set its appeasing theatricalities into motion only at the touch of ready gold.
Durkin remembered, at that moment, that he was woefully hungry.

He also remembered, more gratefully, that the young Chicagoan, the lonely and loquacious youth he had met the day before in the _cafe_ of the "_Terrasse_," had asked him to take dinner with him, to view the splendor of "_Ciro's_" and a keeper of the _vestiaire_ in scarlet breeches and silk stockings.

Afterwards they were to go to the little bon-bon play-house up by the more pretentious bon-bon Casino.

He was to watch the antics of a band of actors toying with some mimic fate, flippantly, to the sound of music, when his own destiny swung trembling on the last silken thread of tortured suspense! Yet it was better than moping alone, he told himself.