e piazza with big towels round his neck and
shout, "Who's coming for an early dip?" And so the day's fun and
jollity--heaven help me--will begin again.

Presently they will all come trooping in to breakfast, in coloured
blazers and fancy blouses, laughing and grabbing at the food with mimic
rudeness and bursts of hilarity. And to think that I might have been
breakfasting at my club with the morning paper propped against the
coffee-pot, in a silent room in the quiet of the city.

I repeat that it is my own fault that I am here.

For many years it had been a principle of my life to visit nobody. I had
long since learned that visiting only brings misery. If I got a card or
telegram that said, "Won't you run up to the Adirondacks and spend the
week-end with us?" I sent back word: "No, not unless the Adirondacks
can run faster than I can," or words to that effect. If the owner of
a country house wrote to me: "Our man will meet you with a trap any
afternoon that you care to name," I answered, in spirit at least: "No,
he won't, not unless he has a bear-trap or one of those traps in which
they catch wild antelope." If any fashionable lady friend wrote to me
in the peculiar jargon that they use: "Can you give us from July the
twelfth at half-after-three till the fourteenth at four?" I replied:
"Madam, take the whole month, take a year, but leave me in peace."

Such at least was the spirit of my answers to invitations. In practice
I used to find it sufficient to send a telegram that read: "Crushed with
work impossible to get away," and then stroll back into the reading-room
of the club and fall asleep again.

But my coming here was my own fault. It resulted from one of those
unhappy moments of expansiveness such as occur, I imagine, to
everybody--moments when one appears to be something quite different
from what one really is, when one feels oneself a thorough good fellow,
sociable, merry, appreciative, and finds the people around one the
same. Such moods are known to all of us. Some people say that it is the
super-self asserting itself. Others say it is from drinking. But let
it pass. That at any rate was the kind of mood that I was in when I met
Beverly-Jones and when he asked me here.

It was in the afternoon, at the club. As I recall it, we were drinking
cocktails and I was thinking what a bright, genial fellow Beverly-Jones
was, and how completely I had mistaken him. For myself--I admit it--I
am a brighter, better man