It gave him the impression of being always under glass.
It made him ache for the sting and bite of a New England north-easter.
It screened and shut off the actualities and perpetuities of life as completely as the drop and wings of a playhouse might.

Its sense of casual and careless calm, too, seemed to him only the rest of a spinning top.

Its unrelated continuities of appeal, its incessant coquetries of attire, its panoramic beauty of mountain and cape and sea-front, its parade of corporeal and egotistic pleasures, its primordial and undisguised appeal to the carnival spirit, its frank, exotic festivity, its volatile and almost too vital atmosphere, and, above all, its glowing and over-odorous gardens and flowerbeds, its overcrowded and grimly Dionysian Promenade, its murmurous and alluring restaurants on steep little boulevards--it was all a blind, Durkin argued with himself, to drape and smother the cynical misery of the place.

Underneath all its flaunting and waving softnesses life ran grim and hard--as grim and hard as the solid rock that lay so close beneath its jonquils and violets and its masking verdure of mimosa and orange and palm.
He hated it, he told himself in his tragic and newborn austerity of spirit, as any right-minded and clean-living man should hate paper roses or painted faces.

Every foot of it, that night, seemed a muffled and mediate insult to intelligence.