“My personal opinion? That doesn’t come out until I take my necktie off,” I said with a grin. “But today I’ll make an exception. A kitchen probably does need a few things more than it needs unity. But those other elements are things you can’t sell. And in this pragmatic world of ours, things you can’t sell don’t count for much.”

“Is the world such a pragmatic place?”

I took out a cigarette and lit it with my lighter.

“I don’t know—the word just popped out,” I said. “But it explains a lot. It makes work easier, too. You can play games with it, make up neat expressions: ‘essentially pragmatic,’ or ‘pragmatic in essence.’ If you look at things that way, you avoid all kinds of complicated problems.”

“What an interesting view!”

“Not really. It’s what everybody thinks. Oh, by the way, we’ve got some pretty good champagne. Care to have some?”

“Thanks. I’d love to.”

As we chatted over champagne, we realized we had several mutual acquaintances. Since our part of the business world was not a very big pond, if you tossed in a few pebbles, one or two were bound to hit a mutual acquaintance. In addition, she and my kid sister happened to have graduated from the same university. With markers like this to follow, our conversation went along smoothly.

She was unmarried, and so was I. She was twenty-six, and I was thirty-one. She wore contact lenses, and I wore glasses. She praised my necktie, and I praised her jacket. We compared rents and complained about our jobs and salaries. In other words, we were beginning to like each other. She was an attractive woman, and not at all pushy. I stood there talking with her for a full twenty minutes, unable to discover a single reason not to think well of her.

As the party was breaking up, I invited her to join me in the hotel’s cocktail lounge, where we settled in to continue our conversation. A soundless rain went on falling outside the lounge’s panoramic window, the lights of the city sending blurry messages through the mist. A damp hush held sway over the nearly empty cocktail lounge. She ordered a frozen daiquiri and I had a scotch on the rocks.

Sipping our drinks, we carried on the kind of conversation that a man and woman have in a bar when they have just met and are beginning to like each other. We talked about our college days, our tastes in music, sports, our daily routines.