“My word, I have done the same things.”

They exchanged smiles.

“What written tale can compare with this living one?” continued Breitmann, his eyes brilliant, his voice eager and the tone rich.  “Ah!  How many times have I berated the day I was born!  To have lived in that day, to have been a part of that bewildering war panorama; from Toulon to Waterloo!  Pardon; perhaps I bore you?”

“By George, no!  I’m as bad, if not worse.  I shall never forgive one of my forebears for serving under Wellington.”

“Nor I one of mine for serving under Bluecher!”

They laughed aloud this time.  It is always pleasant to meet a person who waxes enthusiastic over the same things as oneself.  And Fitzgerald was drawn toward this comparative stranger, who was not ashamed to speak from his heart.  They drifted into a long conversation, and fought a dozen battles, compared this general and that, and built idle fancies upon what the outcome would have been had Napoleon won at Waterloo.  This might have gone on indefinitely had not the patient attendant finally dandled his keys and yawned over his watch.  It was four o’clock, and they had been talking for a full hour.  They exchanged cards, and Fitzgerald, with his usual disregard of convention, invited Breitmann to dine with him that evening at the Meurice.

He selected a table by the window, dining at seven-thirty.  Breitmann was prompt.  In evening clothes there was something distinctive about the man.  Fitzgerald, who was himself a wide traveler and a man of the world, instantly saw and was agreeably surprised that he had asked a gentleman to dine.  Fitzgerald was no cad; he would have been just as much interested in Breitmann had he arrived in a cutaway sack.  But chance acquaintances, as a rule, are rudimental experiments.

They sat down.  Breitmann was full of surprises; and as the evening wore on, Fitzgerald remembered having seen Breitmann’s name at the foot of big newspaper stories.  The man had traveled everywhere, spoke five languages, had been a war correspondent, a sailor in the South Seas, and Heaven knew what else.  He had ridden camels and polo ponies in the Soudan; he had been shot in the Greece-Turkish war, shortly after his having met Fitzgerald; he had played a part in the recent Spanish-American, and had fought against the English in the Transvaal.

“And now I am resting,” he concluded, turning his chambertin round and round, giving the effect of a cluster of rubies on the table linen.  “And all my adventures have been as profitable as these,” indebted for the moment to the phantom rubies.  “But it’s all a great stage, whether you play behind the wings or before the lights.  I am thirty-eight; into twenty of those years I have crowded a century.”

“You don’t look it.”

“Ah, one does not need to dissipate to live quickly.  The life I have led has kept me in health and vigor.  But you?  You are not a man who travels without gaining material.”