I put in a thoroughly unsatisfactory afternoon.  Time dragged eternally.  I dropped in at a summer vaudeville, and bought some ties at a haberdasher’s.  I was bored but unexpectant; I had no premonition of what was to come.  Nothing unusual had ever happened to me; friends of mine had sometimes sailed the high seas of adventure or skirted the coasts of chance, but all of the shipwrecks had occurred after a woman passenger had been taken on.  “Ergo,” I had always said “no women!” I repeated it to myself that evening almost savagely, when I found my thoughts straying back to the picture of John Gilmore’s granddaughter.  I even argued as I ate my solitary dinner at a downtown restaurant.

“Haven’t you troubles enough,” I reflected, “without looking for more?  Hasn’t Bad News gone lame, with a matinee race booked for next week?  Otherwise aren’t you comfortable?  Isn’t your house in order?  Do you want to sell a pony in order to have the library done over in mission or the drawing-room in gold?  Do you want somebody to count the empty cigarette boxes lying around every morning?”

Lay it to the long idle afternoon, to the new environment, to anything you like, but I began to think that perhaps I did.  I was confoundedly lonely.  For the first time in my life its even course began to waver:  the needle registered warning marks on the matrimonial seismograph, lines vague enough, but lines.

My alligator bag lay at my feet, still locked.  While I waited for my coffee I leaned back and surveyed the people incuriously.  There were the usual couples intent on each other:  my new state of mind made me regard them with tolerance.  But at the next table, where a man and woman dined together, a different atmosphere prevailed.  My attention was first caught by the woman’s face.  She had been speaking earnestly across the table, her profile turned to me.  I had noticed casually her earnest manner, her somber clothes, and the great mass of odd, bronze-colored hair on her neck.  But suddenly she glanced toward me and the utter hopelessness—­almost tragedy —­of her expression struck me with a shock.  She half closed her eyes and drew a long breath, then she turned again to the man across the table.

Neither one was eating.  He sat low in his chair, his chin on his chest, ugly folds of thick flesh protruding over his collar.  He was probably fifty, bald, grotesque, sullen, and yet not without a suggestion of power.  But he had been drinking; as I looked, he raised an unsteady hand and summoned a waiter with a wine list.

The young woman bent across the table and spoke again quickly.  She had unconsciously raised her voice.  Not beautiful, in her earnestness and stress she rather interested me.  I had an idle inclination to advise the waiter to remove the bottled temptation from the table.  I wonder what would have happened if I had?  Suppose Harrington had not been intoxicated when he entered the Pullman car Ontario that night!