side-street where his attention was caught by the semiclandestine character of a dingy bar which bore the legend, in half obliterated lettering: Café International. International dregs, if anything, he reflected, and partly out of curiosity, partly out of weariness and a desire to hide, he entered and sat in a dim corner, ordering a hot grog to counteract the effects of his chill.
A handful of sinister but harmless young men sat about the room and he overheard scraps of strange talk,—talk which accorded with the gaudy and shabby purple crepe paper roses sewn upon the orange cotton lampshades. A smoky, smutty, indefinably illicit rendezvous. Except for the inevitable fat woman enthroned at the caisse, there was only one other woman in the dive, and she seemed oddly out of place, though apparently quite at home.
She was a street girl, and to judge by her neat costume and clear blue eyes, a reasonably successful one, but to Grover's mind, which today was exceptionally alive to every feminine manifestation, she was bafflingly different from the creatures who were forever begging cigarettes and whom one was forever sending about their business. For one thing there was no sign of a challenge in her candid regard. The eyes met one steadily enough, but there was in them a light which he could only describe to himself as "good."
At Harvard a popular professor of literature had railed against the sentimentalists who confused the
