“Those kids of mine—­I wonder—­by God, Mr. Goodall of Memphis, we had too little of that whiskey!  No slow music in mine, if you please.  It makes you disremember to forget.”

Hurd of Toledo, here pulls out his watch, and says:  “I’m a son of a gun!  Got an engagement for a hack ride out to San Pedro Springs at eleven.  Forgot it.  A fellow from Noo York, and me, and the Castillo sisters at Rhinegelder’s Garden.  That Noo York chap’s a lucky dog—­got one whole lung—­good for a year yet.  Plenty of money, too.  He pays for everything.  I can’t afford—­to miss the jamboree.  Sorry you ain’t going along.  Good-by, Goodall of Memphis.”

He rounds the corner and shuffles away, casting off thus easily the ties of acquaintanceship as the moribund do, the season of dissolution being man’s supreme hour of egoism and selfishness.  But he turns and calls back through the fog to the other:  “I say, Goodall of Memphis!  If you get there before I do, tell ’em Hurd’s a-comin’ too.  Hurd, of T’leder, Ah-hia.”

Thus Goodall’s tempter deserts him.  That youth, uncomplaining and uncaring, takes a spell at coughing, and, recovered, wanders desultorily on down the street, the name of which he neither knows nor recks.  At a certain point he perceives swinging doors, and hears, filtering between them a noise of wind and string instruments.  Two men enter from the street as he arrives, and he follows them in.  There is a kind of ante-chamber, plentifully set with palms and cactuses and oleanders.  At little marble-topped tables some people sit, while soft-shod attendants bring the beer.  All is orderly, clean, melancholy, gay, of the German method of pleasure.  At his right is the foot of a stairway.  A man there holds out his hand.  Goodall extends his, full of silver, the man selects therefrom a coin.  Goodall goes upstairs and sees there two galleries extending along the sides of a concert hall which he now perceives to lie below and beyond the anteroom he first entered.  These galleries are divided into boxes or stalls, which bestow with the aid of hanging lace curtains, a certain privacy upon their occupants.

Passing with aimless feet down the aisle contiguous to these saucy and discreet compartments, he is half checked by the sight in one of them of a young woman, alone and seated in an attitude of reflection.  This young woman becomes aware of his approach.  A smile from her brings him to a standstill, and her subsequent invitation draws him, though hesitating, to the other chair in the box, a little table between them.

Goodall is only nineteen.  There are some whom, when the terrible god Phthisis wishes to destroy he first makes beautiful; and the boy is one of these.  His face is wax, and an awful pulchritude is born of the menacing flame in his cheeks.  His eyes reflect an unearthly vista engendered by the certainty of his doom.  As it is forbidden man to guess accurately concerning his fate, it is inevitable that he shall tremble at the slightest lifting of the veil.