His face remained unvaryingly gray, his suits frayed evenly, his soles thinned smoothly, his gloves wore out not finger by finger but all at once, as they should.

He remained alert to his duties, however. His genius for detecting step by step the most wayward activities led him to his most brilliant feat of all.

One relative having wanted to travel across the Atlantic with a companion who was not her husband, deceived all her friends as to the date of her sailing and boarded a ship leaving a day earlier.

As she walked up and down the deck with her compromising escort, thinking regretfully of the flowers, fruit and books which would be delivered elsewhere and lost to her, she encountered Uncle Philip holding a small bouquet and saying in an appropriate voice: "Bon voyage! Give my regards to the family when you get to America!"

The only surprising fact was that Uncle Philip failed to greet them at their arrival on the other side.

"Am I aging?" asked Uncle Philip of himself as he awakened, picked up the newspaper at his door, the breakfast tray, and went back to his bed.

He was losing his interest in genealogical trees.

He thought of the café and of all the people he had seen there, watched, listened to. From their talk they seemed to have been born without parents, without relatives. They will all run away, forgotten, or separated from the past. None of them acknowledged parents, or even nationalities.

When he questioned them they were irritated with him, or fled from him.

He thought they were rootless, and yet he felt they were bound to each other, and related to each other as if they had founded new ties, a new kind of family, a new country.

He was the lonely one, he the esprit de famille.

The sap that ran through the family tree had not bloomed in him as the sap that ran through these people as they sat together.

He wanted to get up and dress and sit with them. He remembered a painting he had seen in a book of mythology. All in coral and gold, a vast tree, and sitting at each tip of a branch, a mythological personage, man, woman, child, priest or poet, scribe, lyre player, dancer, goddess, god, all sitting in the same tree with a mysterious complacency of unity.

When Donald had been ejected from his apartment because he had not been able to pay his rent, all of them had come in the night and formed a chain and helped him to move his belongings out of the window, and the only danger had been one of discovery due to their irrepressible laughter.

When Jay sold a painting he came to the café to celebrate and that night everyone ate abundantly.

When Lillian gave a concert they all went together forming a compact block of sympathy with effusive applause.