There was no common room at The Bachelors', and the men did not meet except at the table. They loafed in their rooms, and rarely visited one another. Raridan was the most social among them and lounged in on one or the other in his easy fashion. They in turn sought him out to deride him, or to poke among his effects and to ask him why he never had any interesting books. The books that he was always buying--minor poems and minor essays, did not tempt them. The presence of _L'Illustrazione Italiana_ on his table from week to week amused them; they liked to look at the pictures and they had once gone forth in a body to the peanut vender at the next corner, to witness a test of Raridan's Italian, about which they were skeptical. The stormy interview that followed between Raridan and the Sicilian had been immensely entertaining and had proved that Raridan could really buy peanuts in a foreign tongue, though the fine points which he tried to explain to the bachelors touching the differences in Italian dialects did not interest them. Warry himself was interested in Italian dialects for that winter only. Wheaton went to his room and made himself comfortable. He re-read the Sunday papers through all their supplements, dwelling again on the events of the carnival. He had saved all the other papers that contained carnival news, and now brought them out and cut from them all references to himself. He resolved to open a kind of social scrap book in which to preserve a record of his social doings. The joint portraits of the king and queen of the carnival had not been very good; the picture of Evelyn Porter was a caricature. In Raridan's room he had seen a photograph of Evelyn as a child; it was very pretty, and Wheaton, too, remembered her from the days in which she wore her hair down her back and waited in the carriage at the front door of the bank for her father. She had lived in a world far removed from him then; but now the chasm had been bridged. He had heard it said in the last year that Evelyn and Warry were undoubtedly fated to marry; but others hinted darkly that some Eastern man would presently appear on the scene.