It was half-after six when I entered Martin's from the Broadway side. I chose a table by the north wall and sat down on the cushioned seat. I ordered dinner, and the ample proportions of it completely hoodwinked the waiter as to the condition of my cardiac affliction: being, as I was, desperately and hopelessly and miserably in love. Old owls say that a man can not eat when he is in love. He can if he is mad at the way the object of his affections has treated him; and I was mad. To be sure, I can not recall what my order was, but the amount of the waiter's check is still vivid to my recollection. I glanced about. The café was crowded, as it usually is at this hour. Here and there I caught glimpses of celebrities and familiar faces: journalists, musicians, authors, artists and actors. This is the time they drop in to be pointed out to strangers from out of town. It's a capital advertisement. To-night, however, none of these interested me in the slightest degree; rather, their animated countenances angered me. How _could_ they laugh and look happy! At my left sat a young man about my own age. He was also in evening dress. At my right a benevolent old gentleman, whose eye-glasses balanced neatly upon the end of his nose, was deeply interested in _The Law Journal_ and a pint of mineral water. A little beyond my table was an exiled Frenchman, and the irritating odor of absinthe drifted at times across my nostrils. With my coffee I ordered a glass of Dantzic, and watched the flakes of beaten gold waver and settle; and presently I devoted myself entirely to my own particularly miserable thoughts.... To be in love and in debt! To be with the gods one moment and hunted by a bill-collector the next! To have the girl you love snub and dismiss you for no more lucid reason than that you did not attend the dance at the Country Club when you promised you would! It did not matter that you had a case on that night from which depended a large slice of your bread and butter; no, that did not matter. Neither did the fact that you had mixed the dates. You had promised to go, and you hadn't gone or notified the girl that you wouldn't go. Your apologetic telegram she had torn into halves and returned the following morning, together with a curt note to the effect that she could not value the friendship of a man who made and broke a promise so easily. It was all over. It was a dashed hard world. How the deuce do you win a girl, anyhow?