And both the invitation and the challenge I accepted, in silence, yet by a gesture which could not be mistaken. It was in silence, too, that I followed him in through the wide doorway and seated myself opposite him at one of the rose-shaded parallelograms of white linen that lay about us in lines as thick and straight as tombstones in an abbey-floor. I did not look at him, for a moment or two, dreading as I did the approaching return to actuality. I let my gaze wander about the riotous-colored room into which the flood-tide of the after-theater crowds was now eddying. It held nothing either new or appealing to me. It was not the first time I had witnessed the stars of stageland sitting in perigean torpor through their seven-coursed suppers, just as it was not the first time I had meekly endured the assaulting vulgarities of onyx pillars and pornographic art for the sake of what I had found to be the most matchless cooking in America. It seemed an equally old story to my new friend across the table, for as I turned away from the surrounding flurry of bare shoulders, as white and soft as a flurry of gull-wings, I saw that he had already ordered a meal that was as mysteriously sumptuous as it was startlingly expensive. He, too, was apparently no stranger to Lobster Square. I still saw no necessity for breaking the silence, although he had begun to drink his wine with a febrile recklessness rather amazing to me. Yet I felt that with each breath of time the bubble of mystery was growing bigger and bigger. The whole thing was something more than the dare-devil adventure of a man at the end of his tether. It was more than the extravagance of sheer hopelessness. It was something which made me turn for the second time and study his face. It was a remarkable enough face, remarkable for its thinness, for its none too appealing pallor, and for a certain tragic furtiveness which showed its owner to be not altogether at peace with his own soul. About his figure I had already detected a certain note of distinction, of nervous briskness, which at once lifted him above the place of the anemic street-adventurer. There was something almost Heraclitean in the thin-lipped and satyric mouth. The skin on the sunken cheeks seemed as tight as the vellum across a snare-drum. From the corner of his eyes, which were shadowed by a smooth and pallid frontal-bone, radiated a network of minutely small wrinkles. His hands, I could see, were almost femininely white, as womanish in their fragility as they were disquieting in their never-ending restless movements. In actual years, I concluded, he might have been anywhere between twenty-five and thirty-five. He was at least younger than I first thought him. Then I looked once more about the crowded room, for I had no wish to make my inspection seem inquisitorial. He, too, let his eyes follow mine in their orbit of exploration. Then, for the first time, he spoke.