“Oh, Lordy!  You can’t tell me anything!” snapped the other voice more incisively.  “Houses?  I’ve had four!  First it was the cellar my wife wanted to eliminate!  Then it was the attic!  Then it was—­We’re living in an apartment now!” he finished abruptly.  “An apartment, mind you!  One of those blankety—­blank—­blank—­blank apartments!”

“Humph!” wailed the first voice again.  “There’s hardly a woman you meet these days who hasn’t got rouge on her cheeks, but a man’s got to go back—­two generations, I guess, if he wants to find one that’s got any flour on her nose!”

“Flour on her nose?” interrupted the sharper voice.  “Flour on her nose?  Oh, ye gods!  I don’t believe there’s a woman in this whole hotel who’d know flour if she saw it!  Women don’t care any more, I tell you!  They don’t care!”

Just as a mere bit of physical stimulus the crescendoish stridency of the speech roused Barton to a lazy smile.  Then, altogether unexpectedly, across indifference, across drowsiness, across absolute physical and mental non-concern, the idea behind the speech came hurtling to him and started him bolt upright in his chair.

“Ha!” he thought.  “I know a girl that cares!” From head to foot a sudden warm sense of satisfaction glowed through him, a throb of pride, a puffiness of the chest.  “Ha!” he gloated.  “H—­”

Then interruptingly from outside the window he heard the click of chairs hitching a bit nearer together.

“Sst!” whispered one voice.  “Who’s the freak in the 1830 clothes?”

“Why, that?  Why, that’s the little Edgarton girl,” piped the other voice cautiously.  “It isn’t so much the ‘1830 clothes’ as the 1830 expression that gets me!  Where in creation—­”

“Oh, upon my soul,” groaned the man whose wife “would live in a hotel.”  “Oh, upon my soul—­if there’s one thing that I can’t stand it’s a woman who hasn’t any style!  If I had my way,” he threatened with hissing emphasis, “if I had my way, I tell you, I’d have every homely looking woman in the world put out of her misery!  Put out of my misery—­is what I mean!”

“Ha!  Ha!  Ha!” chuckled the other voice.

“Ha!  Ha!  Ha!” gibed both voices ecstatically together.

With quite unnecessary haste Barton sprang to the window and looked out.

It was Eve Edgarton!  And she did look funny!  Not especially funny, but just plain, every-day little-Eve-Edgarton funny, in a shabby old English tramping suit, with a knapsack slung askew across one shoulder, a faded Alpine hat yanked down across her eyes, and one steel-wristed little hand dragging a mountain laurel bush almost as big as herself.  Close behind her followed her father, equally shabby, his shapeless pockets fairly bulging with rocks, a battered tin botany kit in one hand, a dingy black camera-box in the other.

Impulsively Barton started out to meet them, but just a step from the threshold of the piazza door he sensed for the first time the long line of smokers watching the two figures grinningly above their puffy brown pipes and cigars.