Mrs. Basine was embarassed by the arrival of her friend Tom Ramsey. He had been a friend of her husband and a rumor had become current that he was now courting her. She denied this with indignation. To herself she admitted she liked to be alone with him. He was a sour-minded man with a liver-red face, a patrician nose and the look of a man of importance. But he was too thin and too short to live up to this look. In the presence of others he usually fell into a silence unless one of the two or three subjects on which he felt himself an authority came up. These subjects were things that had to do with advertising--effective copy, effective display, prices, results. Mr. Ramsey was in the advertising business. Mrs. Basine's embarassment at his arrival was caused by her sympathy for the man and her resentment of his weakness. She knew exactly what would happen. Tom Ramsey would sit through the evening, scrupulously polite to everyone, saying, "Yes, yes. Quite right. Oh, of course. That's absolutely right.... Indeed, I agree with you...." For the first few minutes he would impress everyone as a man of character and intelligence. But gradually this impression would fade and people would stop talking to him and eventually ignore him altogether in the conversation. Why this happened Mrs. Basine could never determine. But it did and it always hurt her. Mr. Ramsey, smiling exuberantly through the introduction, his thin body alive in the slightly overheated room, would in an hour become Mr. Ramsey sitting glassy-eyed and polite in a corner, his liver-red face holding with difficulty a grimace of enthusiastic attentiveness. He would make sporadic starts trying to recover something. When the talk grew boisterous and everyone was making puns and delivering himself of bouncing sarcasms, Ramsey would try to become part of the scene in a way that always startled the company. He would come to life with mysterious suddeness and hurl a jest into the common pot. His manner, however, focused attention on himself rather than his words. In back of the drollery he offered would be a desperation, in fact, sometimes a sense of fury. People would stare at him for an instant thinking, "What an odd, impossible man." And in their contemplation, forget to laugh at his remark, forget even to answer it. And he would be left stranded in a silence--a conversational castaway. A moment later he would collapse, sit glowering in his chair, looking angrily at the carpet. This was painful to Mrs. Basine since she had grown to understand him.