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“Is Mr. Warden at home?” he inquired.

“They’ve gone to the country.”

The fact unexpectedly cut at him. They were gone to the country and he hadn’t known. Two years before he would have known the date, the hour, come up at the last moment for a final drink, and planned his first visit to them. Now they had gone without a word.

Anson looked at his watch and considered a week-end with his family, but the only train was a local that would jolt through the aggressive heat for three hours. And to-morrow in the country, and Sunday–he was in no mood for porch-bridge with polite undergraduates, and dancing after dinner at a rural roadhouse, a diminutive of gaiety which his father had estimated too well.

“Oh, no,” he said to himself….”No.”

He was a dignified, impressive young man, rather stout now, but otherwise unmarked by dissipation. He could have been cast for a pillar of something–at times you were sure it was not society, at others nothing else–for the law, for the church. He stood for a few minutes motionless on the sidewalk in front of a 47th Street apartment-house; for almost the first time in his life he had nothing whatever to do.

Then he began to walk briskly up Fifth Avenue, as if he had just been reminded of an important engagement there. The necessity of dissimulation is one of the few characteristics that we share with dogs, and I think of Anson on that day as some well-bred specimen who had been disappointed at a familiar back door. He was going to see Nick, once a fashionable bartender in demand at all private dances, and now employed in cooling non-alcoholic champagne among the labyrinthine cellars of the Plaza Hotel.

“Nick,” he said, “what’s happened to everything?”

“Dead,” Nick said.

“Make me a whiskey sour.” Anson handed a pint bottle over the counter.”Nick, the girls are different; I had a little girl in Brooklyn and she got married last week without letting me know.”

“That a fact? Ha-ha-ha,” responded Nick diplomatically.”Slipped it over on you.”

“Absolutely,” said Anson.”And I was out with her the night before.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” said Nick, “ha-ha-ha!”

“Do you remember the wedding, Nick, in Hot Springs where I had the waiters and the musicians singing ‘God save the King’?”

“Now where was that, Mr. Hunter?” Nick concentrated doubtfully.”Seems to me that was–“

“Next time they were back for more, and I began to wonder how much I’d paid them,” continued Anson.

“–seems to me that was at Mr. Trenholm’s wedding.”

“Don’t know him,” said Anson decisively. He was offended that a strange name should intrude upon his reminiscences; Nick perceived this.

“Naw–aw–” he admitted, “I ought to know that. It was one of yourcrowd–Brakins…. Baker–“

“Bicker Baker,” said Anson responsively.”They put me in a hearse after it was over and covered me up with flowers and drove me away.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” said Nick.”Ha-ha-ha.”

Nick’s simulation of the old family servant paled presently and Anson went up-stairs to the lobby. He looked around–his eyes met the glance of an unfamiliar clerk at the desk, then fell upon a flower from the morning’s marriage hesitating in the mouth of a brass cuspidor. He went out and walked slowly toward the blood-red sun over Columbus Circle. Suddenly he turned around and, retracing his steps to the Plaza, immured himself in a telephone-booth.

Later he said that he tried to get me three times that afternoon, that he tried every one who might be in New York–men and girls he had not seen for years, an artist’s model of his college days whose faded number was still in his address book–Central told him that even the exchange existed no longer. At length his quest roved into the country, and he held brief disappointing conversations with emphatic butlers and maids. So-and-so was out, riding, swimming, playing golf, sailed to Europe last week. Who shall I say phoned?

It was intolerable that he should pass the evening alone–the private reckonings which one plans for a moment of leisure lose every charm when the solitude is enforced. There were always women of a sort, but the ones he knew had temporarily vanished, and to pass a New York evening in the hired company of a stranger never occurred to him–he would have considered that that was something shameful and secret, the diversion of a travelling salesman in a strange town.