They were sitting at a table in one of the night places of Montmartre. The place was close and hot, full of gilt and glitter, heavy with that unwholesome and seductive fragrance of the night that comes from perfumery, wine, brandy and the erotic intoxication of a night-time pleasure place. Over everything there was a bright yet golden blaze of light that wrought on all it touched — gilt, tinsel, table linen, the natural hue and colouring of the people, the faces of men, and the flesh of the women — an evil but strangely thrilling transformation.

The orchestra had just finished playing a piece that everyone in Paris was singing that year. It was a gay jigging little tune that Mistinguette had made famous; its name was “Ca, c’est Paris,” and one heard it everywhere. One heard lonely wayfarers whistling it as they walked home late at night through the silent narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, and one heard it hummed by taxi-drivers, waiters, and by women in cafés. It was played constantly to the tune of flutes and violins by dance orchestras in the night-clubs of Montmartre and Montparnasse. And, accompanied by the swelling rhythms of the accordion, one heard it at big dance-halls like the Bal Bullier, and in the little dives and stews and café-brothel-dancing places along noisome alleyways near the markets and the Boulevard de Sébastopol.

In spite of its gay jigging lilt, that tune had a kind of mournful fatality. It was one of those songs which seem to evoke perfectly — it is impossible to know why — the whole colour, life, and fragrance of a place and time as nothing else on earth can do. For the boy, that song would haunt him ever after with the image of Paris and of his life that year, with the memory of Starwick, Elinor, and Ann.

The song had for him the fatality of something priceless, irrecoverably lost, full of that bitter joy and anguish we can feel at twenty-four, when the knowledge of man’s brevity first comes to us, when we first know ruin and defeat, when we first understand what we have never known before: that for us, as for every other man alive, all passes, all is lost, all melts before our grasp like smoke; when we know that the moment of beauty carries in it the seeds of its own instant death, that love is gone almost before we have it, that youth is gone before we know it, and that, like every other man, we must grow old and die.

The orchestra had finished playing this tune and the dancers were going to their tables from the polished little square of floor; in a moment Starwick called the leader of the orchestra over to the table and asked him to play Starwick’s favourite song. This was a piece called “My Chile Bon Bon”; it was not new, Starwick had first heard it several years before in Boston, but like the other piece this tune was pregnant with the mournful fatality of a place and period; in its grotesque words and haunting melody there was the sense of something irrevocable, an utter surrender and a deliberate loss, a consciousness of doom. These two pieces together evoked the whole image and quality of that year, and of the life of these four people: for Starwick, in fact, this “Chile Bon Bon” song somehow perfectly expressed the complete fatality that had now seized his life, the sensual inertia of his will.

The orchestra leader nodded smilingly when Starwick asked him to play the song, went back and conferred with his musicians for a moment, and, himself taking up a violin, began to play. As the orchestra played, the leader walked toward their table, and, bending and swaying with the infinite ductile grace which a violin seems to give to all its performers, he stood facing the two women, seeming to offer up the wailing, hauntingly mournful and exciting music as a kind of devotion to their loveliness.

Elinor, tapping the tune out with her fingers on the table-cloth, hummed the words lightly, absently, under her breath; Ann sat quietly, darkly, sullenly attentive; Starwick, at one end of the table, sat turned away, his legs indolently crossed, his ruddy face flushed with emotion, his eyes fixed in a blind stare, and a little wet.

Once, while the piece was being played, Starwick’s pleasant ruddy face was contorted again by the old bestial grimace of nameless anguish and bewilderment which Eugene had seen so many times before, and in which the sense of tragic defeat, frustration, the premonition of impending ruin was legible.

When the orchestra leader had finished with the tune, Starwick turned wearily, thrust his arm indolently across the table towards Ann and wiggling his fingers languidly and a trifle impatiently, said quietly:

“Give me some money.”

She flushed a little, opened her purse, and said sullenly:

“How much do you want?”

The weary impatience of his manner became more evident, he wiggled his languid fingers in a more peremptory command, and, burbling a little with laughter at sight of her sullen face, he said in a low tone of avaricious humour:

“Give, give, give. . . . Money, money, money,” he said in a low gloating tone, and burbled again, with a rich welling of humour, as he looked at her.

Red in the face, she flung a wad of banknotes down upon the table with almost vicious force; he accepted them languidly, stripped off 300 franc notes and handed them indolently to the orchestra leader, who responded with a bow eloquent with adoration; and then, without pausing to count them, Starwick thrust the remainder carelessly in his pocket.

“Ann!” he said reproachfully. “I am VERY hurt!” He paused a moment; the flow and burble of soft laughter came quickly, flushing his ruddy face, and he continued as before, with a mock gravity of reproachful humour.

“I had hoped —” his shoulders trembled slightly —“that by this time your FINER nature —” he trembled again with secret merriment —“your FINER nature would be ready to reveal itself.”

“My finer nature be damned!” Ann said angrily. “Whether you like it or not, I think it’s disgraceful the way you fling money around! Three hundred francs to a man for playing that damned song! And you’ve done the same thing at least a dozen times! God, I’m sick of hearing about your ‘Chile Bon Bon’!” she concluded bitterly. “I wish the damned thing had never been written.”

“Ann!” again the soft mockery of sounded reproach. “And this is the way you repay us, after all we’ve done for you! It’s not that I’m angry but I’m VERY, VERY hurt,” he said gently. “I really am, you know.”

“Ah-h!” She made a sudden exasperated movement as if she was going to push the table away from her and get up, and then said with angry warning: “Now, look here, Frank, don’t you start that again about how much you’ve done for me. Done for me!” she said furiously. “Done ............