It was about half past nine when I came back to my apartment. I stripped off my clothes and put in two hours of work. Then the phone rang. I was sure it would be Ricky. Some men's wives, calling that late, would be checking up. Ricky would just be missing me. I jumped over to the phone. It wasn't that clear Hello Darling, like a star in clouds, a landfall in unknown, tedious seas. "Hello. Phil Wylie?" A pleasant voice. Yvonne, perhaps. "Yeah-me." I wasn't very civil since it wasn't Ricky. "This is Gwen. Can you talk?" "Gwen?" "We met last night. If you've forgotten so soon, it's not my fault." The redheaded girl at Hattie's--the one who looked studious and unaffected--the one who had made me think of the handsome wife of some fortunate professor. An interesting one. "Oh," I said. "Sure." "I'm not--interrupting--anything? Hattie said you were being a bachelor--and you sat up late. I just asked her." "I was working." "And I was hoping you were lonesome." "Well, I am, as a matter of fact." "Goody! I'll take a cab." I was going to tell her to do no such thing. I sat down on the sofa to explain my intention of working until the words ran together and all I could manage was a dozen steps to bed sometime, probably, before dawn. But I leaned back and, in doing that, I looked into the other room. I saw myself sitting there, trying to read myself to sleep, eating some of Tom's barbiturate to help--and solitude eating me. I said, "All right." "You sound terribly nonchalant." "It's the telephone," I said. "You can't see over it." She chuckled and drew in her breath just enough so I heard it and said, "Twenty minutes." I fixed up the manuscript and set the bridge table aside. Then I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. "Why?" I said to myself. This inquiry may seem to have a connotation of guilt. Such is not the case. It represented introspection, which I continued as I removed, in the now-tepid water that emerged from the tap marked "cold," all track and trickle of the night's labors. My friend Dave Berne--whom I'd come upon with Marcia in _dolce far niente_--once quoted Forbisher-Laroche to the effect that there are fifteen hundred and six discrete reasons for associating with prostitutes and only nine even potentially commensurate objections. Dave and I, with an hour or so to spare at the time, were able to list three hundred and twenty of the fifteen hundred and six and felt, upon discontinuing the game, that we had every good prospect of recapitulating the lot from our own joint knowledge.