His thought shot back to the night of the Punjabi dinner. That little basement room was devastated before his mind, the table overturned, the face of Miss Claes a mockery, the face of Pidge Musser--that of an American girl found out. Into the center of his consciousness was now flung his old promise not to hate.... He heard his own laughter. He saw his own stretched and twisted mouth from which it came. Like a couple of sly schoolgirls, they looked at him now--Pidge and Miss Claes--slyly pulling together and duping a fat boy.... He saw his room key upon the table. Number Five, it was, the fifth floor. He looked around the dim papered wall--whitish-red like the pulp of raspberries--the deep upholstered chairs, the seats slightly crushed, the full-length mirror, the ash tray, the silver flask on the writing table, his own things here and there orderly enough--all but himself, a sort of maniacal Mr. Hyde. Number Five. He would remember this room where he had fought it out, too, about America entering the war. He poured brandy into a whisky glass. The stuff eased him a little. It made the pain all the more poignant, like a stove getting hotter, but also it seemed to give him the power to move back a little from the stove.... He stood up in the dark and shook himself. “Oh, you ass!” he muttered. “You awful ass!” In the light of a match, as he lit a cigarette long afterward, he saw the rest of his mail on the table, one letter from Miss Claes. He couldn’t get head nor tail out of that at first. She seemed to be talking about something he had said about finding a Man. Oh, yes. He had written from Mecca, mentioning Tom Lawrence and his search for a Man. He snickered now at himself through the fogs of his own past and present. Then a line seemed to stand up before his eyes. “... If you go to India, go to Ahmedabad. Nagar is there. You are in danger of finding your Man.” Later that night, still in the dark, his back straightened. He laughed and said aloud, failing altogether for the moment to see the absurdity of himself. “Number Five--queer little old musty room, I wonder who died here?... Good night, Pidge; good night, dear America--grand pair to tie to!” The next day he cabled to his newspaper connection that he was not returning to France for the opening campaign, at least; and wrote to John Higgins that he didn’t expect to send in much stuff for the present. “I may stay awhile in India--just looking around. She smells like a typhoid ward, and needs orderlies.... I’ll, of course, let you know what comes of my _spectating_.”