Page:Bedford-Jones--The Mardi Gras Mystery.djvu/86

 —why are so many furnished from bargain sales? This place is touched with repose and sweetness; to come and sit here is a privilege. It is like being in another world, after all the money striving and the dollar madness of the city."

"Oh!" The girl's gaze searched him curiously. "I hope you're not going to take the fine artistic pose that it is a crime to make money?"

Gramont laughed.

"Not much! I want to make money myself; that's one reason I'm in New Orleans. Still, you cannot deny that there is a craze about the eternal clutching after dollars. I can't make the dollar sign the big thing in life, Lucie. You couldn't, either."

She frowned a little.

"You seem to have the European notion that all Americans are dollar chasers!"

He shrugged his shoulders slightly. His harshly lined face was very strong; one sensed that its harshness had come from the outside—from hunger, from hardship and privations, from suffering strongly borne. He had not gone through the war unscathed, this young man who had tossed away a