"Then why can you tell me what I want to know?" he asked, still eying me with open hostility. I struggled to keep my temper. It was a case where one could afford to be indulgent. "If we each have a friend in this lady, it's not unreasonable that we should be able to be friends ourselves," I told him. "So let's clear the cobwebs by a spin down-town." "Gasoline won't wash my particular cobwebs away," he retorted. There was something likable about his audacious young face, even under its cloud of bitterness. "Then why couldn't you dine with me, at a very quiet club of mine?" I suggested. "Or, better still, on the veranda of the Clairemont, where we can talk together." He hesitated at first, but under my pressure he yielded, and we both got in the car and swung westward, and then up Riverside to the Clairemont. There I secured a corner piazza-table, overlooking the river. And there I exerted a skill of which I had once been proud, in ordering a dinner which I thought might appeal to the poignantly unhappy young man who sat across the table from me. I could see that he was still looking at me, every now and then, with both revolt and sullen bewilderment written on his lean young face. It would be no easy matter, I knew, to win his confidence. "I suppose you think I'm crazy, like the rest of them?" he suddenly demanded. I noticed that he had already taken his third drink of wine. "Why should I think that?" "I've had enough to make me crazy!" he ejaculated, with that abject self-pity which marks the last milestone on the avenue of hope. "Perhaps I could help you," I suggested. "Or perhaps I could advise you." "What good's advice when you're up against what I'm up against?" was his embittered retort. He was apparently finding relief in the Pommery. I found a compensating relief in merely beholding that look of haunted and abject misery going out of his young eyes. "Then tell me what the trouble is," I said. He still shook his head. Then he suddenly looked up. "How long have you known Harriet Walter?" he asked. "From the time," I told him, after a moment's thought, "when she first appeared for the Fresh Air Fund at the Plaza. That was about two years ago--when she first went with Frohman." "I've known her for twenty years!" was the youth's unexpected exclamation. "We grew up together, out West." "Where out West?" I asked. "In Medicine Hat--that's a Canadian prairie town." "But she's younger than you?" "Only two years. She's twenty-two; I'm twenty-four. She changed her name from Wilson to Walter when she went on the stage." "Then you are close friends?" I asked, for I could see the wine had loosened his reticent young tongue. "Friends!" he scoffed. "I'm the man she promised to marry!"