place in his existence.  For he was practical, balanced, sane.  He had, moreover, the tendency towards temperance of the born athlete.  Besides all this, his main interests were man-interests.  But women would not let him alone.  He had but to look and the thing was done.  Wreaths hung on every balcony for Honey Smith and, always at his approach, the door of the harem swung wide.  He was a little lazy, almost discourteously uninterested in his attitude towards, the individual female; for he had never had to exert himself.

It is likely that all this personal popularity would have been the result of that trick of personality.  But many good fairies had been summoned to Honey’s christening; he had good looks besides.  He was really tall, although his broad shoulders seemed to reduce him to medium height.  Brown-skinned, brown-eyed, brown-haired, his skin was as smooth as satin, his eyes as clear as crystal, his hair as thick as fur.  His expression had tremendous sparkle.  But his main physical charm was a smile which crumpled his brown face into an engaging irregularity of contour and lighted it with an expression brilliant with mirth and friendliness.

He was a true soldier of fortune.  In the ten years which his business career covered be had engaged in a score of business ventures.  He had lost two fortunes.  Born in the West, educated in the East, he had flashed from coast to coast so often that he himself would have found it hard to say where he belonged.

He was the admiration and the wonder and the paragon and the criterion of his friend Billy Fairfax, who had trailed his meteoric course through college and who, when the Brian Boru went down, was accompanying him on his most recent adventure — a globe-trotting trip in the interests of a moving-picture company.  Socially they made an excellent team.  For Billy contributed money, birth, breeding, and position to augment Honey’s initiative, enterprise, audacity, and charm.  Billy Fairfax offered other contrasts quite as striking.  On his physical side, he was shapelessly strong and hopelessly ugly, a big, shock-headed blond.  On his personal side “mere mutt-man” was the way one girl put it, “too much of a damned gentleman” Honey Smith said to him regularly.

Billy Fairfax was not, however, without charm of a certain shy, evasive, slow-going kind; and he was not without his own distinction.  His huge fortune had permitted him to cultivate many expensive sports and sporting tastes.  His studs and kennels and strings of polo ponies were famous.  He was a polo-player well above the average and an aviator not far below it.

Pete Murphy, the fifth of the group, was the delight of them all.  The carriage of a bantam rooster, the courage of a lion, more brain than he could stagger under; a disposition fiery, mercurial, sanguine, witty; he was made, according to Billy Fairfax’s dictum, of “wire and brass tacks,” and he possessed what Honey Smith (who himself had no mean gift in that direction) called “the gift of gab.”  He lived by writing magazine articles.  Also he wrote fiction, verse, and drama.  Also he was a painter.  Also he was a musician.  In short, he was an Irishman.