Table there, but you—­Ever feel that way, Paul?  Kind of comes over me:  here I’ve pretty much done all the things I ought to; supported my family, and got a good house and a six-cylinder car, and built up a nice little business, and I haven’t any vices ’specially, except smoking—­and I’m practically cutting that out, by the way.  And I belong to the church, and play enough golf to keep in trim, and I only associate with good decent fellows.  And yet, even so, I don’t know that I’m entirely satisfied!”

It was drawled out, broken by shouts from the neighboring tables, by mechanical love-making to the waitress, by stertorous grunts as the coffee filled him with dizziness and indigestion.  He was apologetic and doubtful, and it was Paul, with his thin voice, who pierced the fog: 

“Good Lord, George, you don’t suppose it’s any novelty to me to find that we hustlers, that think we’re so all-fired successful, aren’t getting much out of it?  You look as if you expected me to report you as seditious!  You know what my own life’s been.”

“I know, old man.”

“I ought to have been a fiddler, and I’m a pedler of tar-roofing!  And Zilla—­Oh, I don’t want to squeal, but you know as well as I do about how inspiring a wife she is....  Typical instance last evening:  We went to the movies.  There was a big crowd waiting in the lobby, us at the tail-end.  She began to push right through it with her ’Sir, how dare you?’ manner—­Honestly, sometimes when I look at her and see how she’s always so made up and stinking of perfume and looking for trouble and kind of always yelping, ’I tell yuh I’m a lady, damn yuh!’—­why, I want to kill her!  Well, she keeps elbowing through the crowd, me after her, feeling good and ashamed, till she’s almost up to the velvet rope and ready to be the next let in.  But there was a little squirt of a man there—­probably been waiting half an hour—­I kind of admired the little cuss—­and he turns on Zilla and says, perfectly polite, ’Madam, why are you trying to push past me?’ And she simply—­God, I was so ashamed!—­she rips out at him, ‘You’re no gentleman,’ and she drags me into it and hollers, ‘Paul, this person insulted me!’ and the poor skate he got ready to fight.

“I made out I hadn’t heard them—­sure! same as you wouldn’t hear a boiler-factory!—­and I tried to look away—­I can tell you exactly how every tile looks in the ceiling of that lobby; there’s one with brown spots on it like the face of the devil—­and all the time the people there—­they were packed in like sardines—­they kept making remarks about us, and Zilla went right on talking about the little chap, and screeching that ’folks like him oughtn’t to be admitted in a place that’s supposed to be for ladies and gentlemen,’ and ’Paul, will you kindly call the manager, so I can report this dirty rat?’ and—­Oof!  Maybe I wasn’t glad when I could sneak inside and hide in the dark!

“After twenty-four years of that kind of thing, you don’t expect me to fall down and foam at the mouth when you hint that this sweet, clean, respectable, moral life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, do you?  I can’t even talk about it, except to you, because anybody else would think I was yellow.  Maybe I am.  Don’t care any longer....  Gosh, you’ve had to stand a lot of whining from me, first and last, Georgie!”