He felt the gulf that separated their two oddly diverse lives--the one the youth eager to dip into experience, the other a fugitive from a many-sided past that still shadowed and menaced him.
He listened with only half an ear as the Chicagoan expounded some glib and ancient principle about the fairy tale being even truer than truth itself.
"Why," he continued argumentatively, "everything that happened in that play might happen here, tonight, to you or me!" "Rubbish!" ejaculated Durkin, brusquely, remembering how lonely he must indeed have been thus to attach himself to this youth of the studios.
But he added, as a matter of form: "You think, then, that life today _is_ as romantic as it once was ?" "_Mon Dieu_!" cried the other.

"Look at Monte Carlo here! Of course it is.

It's more crowded, more rapid; it holds _more_ romance.

We didn't put it all off, you know, with doublet and hose!" "No, of course not," answered Durkin absently.

Life, at that moment, was confronting him so grimly, so flat and sterile and uncompromising in its secret exactions, that he had no heart to theorize about it.
"And a thing isn't romantic just because it's moss-grown!" continued the child of the studios, warming to his subject.