hey eagerly seek each morning
for one little remaining trace of this. The tiniest hint would suffice.
But they encounter only a rather sad-faced, middle-aged Chinaman, with
immovable eyes and a strained devotion to delicate tasks, of whom it is
impossible to believe that ever a ray of joy gladdened his life.

There is a secondary reason why the spirit of Lew Wee has not long since
been disembodied by able hands: His static Gorgon face stays the first
murderous impulse; then his genial kitchen aroma overpowers their higher
natures and the deed of high justice is weakly postponed. This genial
kitchen aroma is warm, and composed cunningly from steaming coffee and
frying ham or beef, together with eggs and hot cakes almost as large
as the enamelled iron plates from which they are eaten. It is no
contemptible combination on a frosty morning. No wonder strong men
forget the simple act of manslaughter they come there to achieve and
sit sullenly down to be pandered to by him who was erst their torturer.

On a morning in late May, when I had been invited to fare abroad with
my hostess, Mrs. Lysander John Pettengill--who would breakfast in her
own apartment--I joined this assemblage of thwarted murderers as they
doggedly ate. It is a grim business, that ranch breakfast. Two paling
lamps struggle with the dawn, now edging in, and the half light is held
low in tone by smoke from the cake griddle, so that no man may see
another too plainly. But no man wishes to see another. He stares dully
into his own plate and eats with stern aversion. We might be so many
strangers in a strange place, aloof, suspicious, bitter, not to say
truculent.

No quip or jest will lighten the gloom. Necessary requests for the
sugar or the milk or the stewed apples are phrased with a curtly
formal civility. We shall be other men at noon or at night, vastly
other, sunnier men, with abundance of quip and jest and playful sally
with the acid personal tang. But from warm beds of repose! We avoid
each other's eyes, and one's subdued "please pass that sirup pitcher!"
is but tolerated like some boorish profanation of a church service.

The simple truth, of course, is that this is the one hour of the day
when we are face to face with the evil visage of life unmasked; our
little rosy illusions of yestereve are stale and crumpled. Not until we
are well out in the sun, with the second cigarette going good, shall we
again become credulous about life and safe to addre