Nathan and I had revived and rescaled our friendships with mixtures of rum and soda water, the number of which a persistent, unsolicited clerk in the back of my tortured head kept trying, this morning, to count from memory. And at sometime these scorched, half-blinded eyes of mine had seen a chorus of footsore girls dancing on a platform to a rompish paraphrase of “O, Come All Ye Faithful.” They had been dressed like Santa Claus, if Santa Claus had been a girl in red, fur-trimmed underdrawers and a brassière of gold stars and had worn, in place of the smile of a kind-hearted old innocent, a grin of the most workaday lewdness. Either before or after this travesty, which at the time I had taken for granted but which this morning possessed the impossible quality of a comic dream, a sailor in His Majesty’s, the King of England’s, employ had briefly joined us and in exchange for my wilted camellias which he requested, declaring that he would preserve them to the end of his days in his mother’s prayer-book, he gave me a picture post card that we all regarded as irresistibly droll. It showed, in vivid colors, a small, libidinous, middle-aged man staring at a bathing beauty about to dive into the ocean while his portly wife, surveying a group of new cottages, remarked: “Look at the seaside development, George.” For some purpose, lost forever to memory, the sailor had laboriously printed his name, Sam Casserly, on the back with an obtuse blue pencil.

The iconoclastic antics of the dancing girls and the transaction with Sam Casserly together accounted for perhaps fifteen or twenty minutes out of the five hours we had spent in the crowded room where the green and red lights, veiled by smoke, made the atmosphere crepuscular. But I remembered that we had not been idle and that our intake of noteworthy amounts of rum had been accompanied by unflagging talk which, although its substance was irrevocable, seemed, on retrospect, to have issued altogether from my lips. I could fairly see Nathan’s face patiently registering courteous sympathy with my complaints, amusement at my mirthless anecdotes, respect for my moral and literary judgments. And yet, gradually, as if I were reading a book which I had forgotten I had read before, so much of my companion’s current history came back that it seemed impossible, in view of the fact that I had learned all this in just five hours, that I could have uttered a word, but that the solo voice had been his, interlarding the calendar of his love-affairs and his scholastic enterprises with expositions of his character, guesses about mine, and childhood reminiscences common to both of us. He was now, he told me, at Harvard and had been for two years, studying literature with the support of a fellowship. He was also tutor to Harry Morgan and was making so much money (he lived very simply) that he had saved almost enough to go to Paris after his graduation. Before the flight from America, he thought he might marry a Japanese girl whom he described as superbly beautiful, or else an elderly French fly-by-night who had no attractions for him but who spoke both German and French and could therefore act as his interpreter. And I believed, though I could not be certain, that when I reminded him that I was also bilingual (this exaggeration had evinced no comment from him), he had accepted my application, but had made it perfectly clear that he was in love with the Japanese girl.