What she felt was not bold; it was not arch; it was not mercenary; it was--simply--an essence of her own responses. A belonging, like the curved shape of her eyebrows or the narrowness of her red nails--which she accepted as no more and no less than that, and revealed as naturally. I wanted to go, even more. One can pick patterns in one's life--rhythms, cadences, aggregates, cross sections, events that occur in pairs and threes--and the phenomenon is undoubtedly the result of chance. But one notices, one superimposes the pattern subjectively--and decides it is not chance but some obscure order, because one likes to feel that obscure orders occur in life. It is difficult to keep the ego perpetually lined up with statistical reality. In twenty-four hours I'd looked at, talked to, explored, and somewhat learned three different, very handsome young women. Mrs. Yvonne Prentiss. Gwen Taylor--at Hattie's. And Marcia. They come in threes, I thought. I thought it had been a long time since I'd met even one girl so pretty as all these. I reminded myself not to be an ass--to keep the view that grouping and variation in no way warp mathematical principle. The obsessive quality of all such ideas weighed on me. I hardly heard her account of their junket, on the preceding Saturday, to Jones' Beach. I began to invent an excuse for present departure--to think ahead about apologizing--my work--the check, please-- Then the busboy dropped the tray. He had tripped, it proved, on a napkin. There were heavy stacks of plates and side dishes on the tray--glasses of water--metal domes. The boy staggered--and the wild gesticulation of his free arm was caught by my peripheral vision. So I saw the tray slant--saw its burden slide and crash onto the heads of a pair of buttressed dowagers, a few tables away. The noise seemed to continue for a long time and a scream permeated it as the boy lost hold entirely on his tray, fell against a chair-back, and dish after soiled dish cascaded onto flower hats, bright blouses, fat shoulders, and freckled necks. A rush of waiters masked the scene. Guests stood to see better. A bull-voiced beldame roared, "Send the manager!" Her less hefty companion burst through the waiters, daubing at the stained area of her bosom and throwing bits of lettuce with every swipe. She made a beeline for the ladies' room--followed by her smeared, stentorian colleague, whose hat was full of dill and parsley. This commotion had hardly died down--Jay had no more than managed to clear the carpet, dispatch the wreckage on the table, send out the chairs for purging, and bite back the last traces of his mirth--when another oddity got under way. "I want," said a man seated beside Paul, "a baked apple." "But there are no baked apples." Fred, the waiter, said this. "Go and tell the chef I want a baked apple." "I did, sir. There are none." "Explain to him that I always have a baked apple, here." "There is applesauce--sir."