for a stein and a chat.  Even by gaslight the diversions are melancholy i’ the mouth—­drink and rag-time, and an occasional surprise when the waiter swabs the suds from under your sticky glass.  There is an answer.  Transmigration!  The soul of Sir Walter Raleigh has traveled from beneath his slashed doublet to a kindred home under Rooney’s visible plaid waistcoat.  Rooney’s is twenty years ahead of the times.  Rooney has removed the embargo.  Rooney has spread his cloak upon the soggy crossing of public opinion, and any Elizabeth who treads upon it is as much a queen as another.  Attend to the revelation of the secret.  In Rooney’s ladies may smoke!

McManus sat down at a vacant table.  He paid for the glass of beer that he ordered, tilted his narrow-brimmed derby to the back of his brick-dust head, twined his feet among the rungs of his chair, and heaved a sigh of contentment from the breathing spaces of his innermost soul; for this mud honey was clarified sweetness to his taste.  The sham gaiety, the hectic glow of counterfeit hospitality, the self-conscious, joyless laughter, the wine-born warmth, the loud music retrieving the hour from frequent whiles of awful and corroding silence, the presence of well-clothed and frank-eyed beneficiaries of Rooney’s removal of the restrictions laid upon the weed, the familiar blended odors of soaked lemon peel, flat beer, and peau d’Espagne—­all these were manna to Cork McManus, hungry for his week in the desert of the Capulet’s high rear room.

A girl, alone, entered Rooney’s, glanced around with leisurely swiftness, and sat opposite McManus at his table.  Her eyes rested upon him for two seconds in the look with which woman reconnoitres all men whom she for the first time confronts.  In that space of time she will decide upon one of two things—­either to scream for the police, or that she may marry him later on.

Her brief inspection concluded, the girl laid on the table a worn red morocco shopping bag with the inevitable top-gallant sail of frayed lace handkerchief flying from a corner of it.  After she had ordered a small beer from the immediate waiter she took from her bag a box of cigarettes and lighted one with slightly exaggerated ease of manner.  Then she looked again in the eyes of Cork McManus and smiled.

Instantly the doom of each was sealed.

The unqualified desire of a man to buy clothes and build fires for a woman for a whole lifetime at first sight of her is not uncommon among that humble portion of humanity that does not care for Bradstreet or coats-of-arms or Shaw’s plays.  Love at first sight has occurred a time or two in high life; but, as a rule, the extempore mania is to be found among unsophisticated creatures such as the dove, the blue-tailed dingbat, and the ten-dollar-a-week clerk.  Poets, subscribers to all fiction magazines, and schatchens, take notice.

With the exchange of the mysterious magnetic current came to each of them the instant desire to lie, pretend, dazzle and deceive, which is the worst thing about the hypocritical disorder known as love.