Ann smiled delightedly.  It was so typical that his father should have called him something like that.  Time had not dimmed her regard for the old man she had seen for that brief moment at Paddington Station.  He was an old dear, and she thoroughly approved of this latest manifestation of his supposed pride in his offspring.

“Is that really your name—­Algernon?”

“I cannot deny it.”

“I think your father is a darling,” said Ann inconsequently.

Jimmy had buried himself in the directory again.

“The D’s,” he said.  “Is it possible that posterity will know me as Bayliss the Dermatologist?  Or as Bayliss the Drop Forger?  I don’t quite like that last one.  It may be a respectable occupation, but it sounds rather criminal to me.  The sentence for forging drops is probably about twenty years with hard labour.”

“I wish you would put that book away and go on with your lunch,” said Ann.

“Perhaps,” said Jimmy, “my grandchildren will cluster round my knee some day and say in their piping, childish voices, ’Tell us how you became the Elastic Stocking King, grandpa!’ What do you think?”

“I think you ought to be ashamed of yourself.  You are wasting your time, when you ought to be either talking to me or else thinking very seriously about what you mean to do.”

Jimmy was turning the pages rapidly.

“I will be with you in a moment,” he said.  “Try to amuse yourself somehow till I am at leisure.  Ask yourself a riddle.  Tell yourself an anecdote.  Think of life.  No, it’s no good.  I don’t see myself as a Fan Importer, a Glass Beveller, a Hotel Broker, an Insect Exterminator, a Junk Dealer, a Kalsomine Manufacturer, a Laundryman, a Mausoleum Architect, a Nurse, an Oculist, a Paper-Hanger, a Quilt Designer, a Roofer, a Ship Plumber, a Tinsmith, an Undertaker, a Veterinarian, a Wig Maker, an X-ray apparatus manufacturer, a Yeast producer, or a Zinc Spelter.”  He closed the book.  “There is only one thing to do.  I must starve in the gutter.  Tell me—­you know New York better than I do—­where is there a good gutter?”

At this moment there entered the restaurant an Immaculate Person.  He was a young man attired in faultlessly fitting clothes, with shoes of flawless polish and a perfectly proportioned floweret in his buttonhole.  He surveyed the room through a monocle.  He was a pleasure to look upon, but Jimmy, catching sight of him, started violently and felt no joy at all; for he had recognised him.  It was a man he knew well and who knew him well—­a man whom he had last seen a bare two weeks ago at the Bachelors’ Club in London.  Few things are certain in this world, but one was that, if Bartling—­such was the Vision’s name—­should see him, he would come over and address him as Crocker.  He braced himself to the task of being Bayliss, the whole Bayliss, and nothing but Bayliss.  It might be that stout denial would carry him through.  After all, Reggie Bartling was a man of notoriously feeble intellect, who could believe in anything.