the lunch-hour crowd twanged a man's
nerves, and I noticed for the first time the devilish song of the
electric fan on my wall. As you have foreseen, I felt suddenly the
wilting of my will. Tired, hungry, sleepless, I slipped down into my
chair, and there seemed no happiness left in a world which did not
include the girl I had left the night before.

I seized my hat and, clapping it on my head, I stopped only to sweep the
papers into the desk drawers and hurried toward the elevator.

"There's somebody on the 'phone for you, Mr. Estabrook," said the
switchboard girl. "They're very anxious to talk."

"Tell 'em I've gone home for the day," I called back to her and then
went down and out of the building to the sunbaked street.

I knew that I should put food in my stomach, so I ate a lunch somewhere.
I knew I should rest, but the thought of returning to my bachelor rooms
suggested only a violent mental review of the events through which I had
been. I was tempted to go to the Monument, but flung the idea aside as a
piece of sentimental madness. Accordingly I walked toward the river
front with its uninteresting and sordid warehouses, saloons and boxes,
bales and crates of the wholesale produce commissioners. On that long,
cobblestoned thoroughfare, with its drays and commercial riffraff, its
lounging stevedores, its refuse barrels, its gutter children and its
heat, I went forward mile after mile, without much thought of where I
went or why I chose such surroundings for my way, unless it was that the
breeze from the water was welcome to me.

The late afternoon found me on an uptown pier, watching the return of an
excursion steamer, proud with flags and alive with children, girls with
sunburned faces and young men with handkerchiefs tucked around their
collars and carrying souvenir canes. They disembarked down a narrow
gangplank, like ants crawling along a straw. I reflected that all were,
like myself, with their individual comedies and tragedies, the
representatives of the countless, forgotten, and ever reproducing
millions of human gnats that through unthinkable periods of time come
and go. I had seen none of them before. I would see none of them again.
Instead of being a depressing notion, I found this a cheerful idea; I
welcomed the evidence of my own insignificance. I laughed. I even
determined to amuse myself. If nothing better offered, I made up my mind
I would visit the Sheik of Baalbec, and, by pitting my skill agai