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.

Artistically, he had all the perception of the Celt plus the acquired

sapience of the painter's training. If he could have existed in a

universe which consisted entirely of sound and color, a universe

inhabited only by disembodied spirits, he would have been its ablest

citizen; but he was utterly disqualified to live in a human world. He

was absolutely incapable of judging people. His tendency was to

underestimate men and to overestimate women. His life bore all the scars

inevitable to such an instinct. Women, in particular, had played ducks

and drakes with his career. Weakly chivalrous, mindlessly gallant, he

lacked the faculty of learning by experience - especially where the

other sex were concerned. "Predestined to be stung!" was, his first

wife's laconic comment on her ex-husband. She, for instance, was

undoubtedly the blameworthy one in their marital failure, but she had

managed to extract a ruinous alimony from him. Twice married and twice

divorced, he was traveled through the Orient to write a series of muck

raking articles and, incidentally if possible, to forget his last

unhappy matrimonial venture.




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