r other side was a young man of
the type which Tavernake detested, partly because it inspired him with
a reluctant but insistent sense of inferiority. The young man was
handsome, tall, and thin. His evening clothes fitted him perfectly,
his studs and links were of the latest mode, his white tie arranged as
though by the fingers of an artist. And yet he was no tailor's model.
A gentleman, beyond a doubt, Tavernake decided, watching grudgingly the
courteous movement of his head, listening sometimes to his well-bred but
rather languid voice. Beatrice laughed often into his face. She admired
him, of course. How could she help it! Grier sat at her other side. He,
too, talked to her whenever he had the chance. It was a new fever which
Tavernake was tasting, a new fever burning in his blood. He was jealous;
he hated the whole party below. In imagination he saw Elizabeth with her
friends, supping most likely in that other, more resplendent restaurant,
only a few yards away. He imagined her the centre of every attention.
Without a doubt, she was looking at her neighbor as she had looked at
him. Tavernake bit his lip, frowning. If he had had it in his power,
in those black moments, to have thrown a thunderbolt from his place, he
would have wrecked every table in the room, he would have watched with
joy the white, startled faces of the revelers as they fled away into
the night. It was a new torture, indescribable, bitter. Indeed, this
curiosity of his, of which he had spoken to Beatrice as they had walked
together down Oxford Street on that first evening, was being satisfied
with a vengeance! He was learning of those other things of life. He had
sipped at the sweetness; he was drinking the bitters!

An altercation by his side distracted him. Again there was the head
waiter and a protesting guest. Tavernake looked up and recognized
Professor Franklin. With his broad-brimmed hat in his hand, the
professor, in fluent phraseology and a strong American accent, was
making himself decidedly disagreeable.

"You had better send for your manager right away, young man," he
declared. "On Tuesday night he brought me here himself and I engaged
this table for the week. No, I tell you I won't have any other! I guess
my order was good enough. You send for Luigi right here. You know who I
am? Professor Franklin's my name, from New York, and if I say I mean to
have a thing, I expect to get it."

For the first time he recognized Tavernake, and paus