Told in a French Garden / August, 1914

Copyright, 1916 By MILDRED ALDRICH

It was by a strange irony of Fate that we found ourselves reunited for a summer's outing, in a French garden, in July, 1914.
With the exception of the Youngster, we had hardly met since the days of our youth.
We were a party of unattached people, six men, two women, your humble servant, and the Youngster, who was an outsider.
With the exception of the latter, we had all gone to school or college or dancing class together, and kept up a sort of superficial acquaintance ever since—that sort of relation in which people know something of one another's opinions and absolutely nothing of one another's real lives.
There was the Doctor, who had studied long in Germany, and become an authority on mental diseases, developed a distaste for therapeutics, and a passion for research and the laboratory. There was the Lawyer, who knew international law as he knew his Greek alphabet, and hated a court room. There was the Violinist, who was known the world over in musical sets,—everywhere, except in the concert room. There was the Journalist, who had travelled into almost as many queer places as Richard Burton, seen more wars, and followed more callings. There was the Sculptor, the fame of whose greater father had almost paralyzed a pair of good modeller's hands. There was the Critic, whose friends believed that in him the world had lost a great romancer, but whom a combination of hunger and laziness, and a proneness to think that nothing not genius was worth while, had condemned to be a mere breadwinner, but a breadwinner who squeezed a lot out of life, and who fervently believed that in his next incarnation he would really be it. Then there was Me, and of the other two women—one was a Trained Nurse, and the other a Divorcée, and—well, none of us really knew just what she had become, but we knew that she was very rich, and very handsome, and had a leaning toward some sort of new religion. As for the Youngster—he was the son of an old chum of the Doctor—his ward, in fact—and his hobby was flying.