I went up to Hattie's bagnio because I am a middle-class American male in the higher brackets, of Princeton extraction, who was denied the poor man's access to females during adolescence and early maturity and who (owing probably to that abnormal deprivation) belongs to a distinguished group that makes blah per cent of its sex contacts with prostitutes, blah per cent by unorthodox means, and blah per cent with males. That is evidently why I knew the address. I went, owing to the fact that a member of the generation behind me--a prodigy, similarly conditioned--of superior stature, superior health, superior life expectancy, superior stability (_sic_), and a superior happiness quotient--far above the average by the tables!--had come a psychological cropper in a tart's arms owing to the fact that the Age of Kinsey is also the Atomic Age and he, briefed in the latter, was emotionally distrait over the conundrum: how to tell the people on the fire escape all about the effect of neutrons on chromosomes--a datum to be regarded as utterly essential for political judgment. And other troubles. Personally, I was of the opinion the poor could not be told at this late date and would have to learn by doing. Also the rich. And this judgment, while it in no way impaired my faith in democracy, and while it gave me a good assurance of the long future, singularly blighted my assessment of so-called democratic practices in the land during the past century and filled me with a ribald contumely for the poor-doting, poor-blind, wisdom-spurning, technologically blank intellectuals, together with nearly everybody else. I wanted to get my nephew out of a jam before he got into one. This is a sentiment I bear toward all humanity. My successes in its prosecution are, sometimes, trivial. Besides which a man who thinks he is soon to die enjoys kiting around in a city he has cherished all his life, among the people he loves, at night, in a cab. I rode up through the marble lobby and past the floor-ledges of the building in the gold elevator cage with the colored boy whose face showed no trace of his fascinating, perennial opportunity to look upon (before and after) the persons and countenances of hundreds of the great, the prominent, and the rich, who were not quite satisfied with the legal sex mores of their environment and the permissions of their acquaintances. I inhaled the many-doored hallway. "Hattie," said Viola, "is out at a party." "Is my nephew Paul here?" She shook her elegant head. "He hasn't been in." Well, I could have phoned. Why didn't I? "Miss Taylor's here." The jungle-bright eyes sloped darkly toward me and away. "Is she? I thought--" "I'll call her." She led me to the same room--Hattie's parlor. I sat down. I could stick around a while. Paul might not come here, in his humiliating chase. He probably would. He'd had--no doubt--other leads to check first.