"I dare say. I have n't your charming knack, Ames, of picking up acquaintances, so you must n't expect me to form life-long friendships with young women at cash-desks. I suppose it did n't occur to you that those young women who tend till and serve the tables in there are persons of education and taste. The Asolando is not a common hashery. I sometimes fear that so much crawling through chimneys is clouding your intellect. It ought to have been clear even to your smoky chimney-pot that those girls in there are not the kind you can ask to meet you by the old mill at the fall of dewy eve, or who write notes to popular romantic actors. There's not a girl in that place who has n't a social position as good as yours or mine. The Asolando's a kind of fad, you know, Ames; it's not a tavern within the meaning of the inn-keepers' act, where common swine are fed for profit. The servants serve for love of the cause; it's a sort of cult. But I suppose you are incapable of grasping it. There was always something sordid in you, and I'm pained to find that you're getting worse." Wiggins had, before now, occasionally taken this attitude toward me, and it was always with a view to obscuring some real issue between us. He requires patience; it is a mistake to attempt to crowd him; but give him rope and he will twist his own halter. We sparred further without result. I had suggested a topic that had clearly some painful association for my friend. He drank his coffee gloomily and lighted a cigar much blacker than the one I knew to be his favorite in the Hare and Tortoise humidor. He excused himself shortly, and I had a glimpse of him later, in the writing-room, engaged upon letters, a fact in itself disquieting, for Wiggins never wrote letters, and it was he who had favored making the Hare and Tortoise writing-room into a den for pipe-smokers. The epistolary habit, he maintained, was one that should be discouraged. I was moodily turning over the evening newspapers when Jewett turned up. Jewett always knows everything. I shall not call him a gossip, but he comes as near deserving the name as a man dares who lectures on the Renaissance before clubs and boarding-schools. Jewett knows his Botticelli, but his knowledge of his contemporaries is equally exact. He dropped the ball into the green of my immediate interest with a neat approach-shot. "Too bad about old Wiggy," he remarked with his preluding sigh. "What's the matter with Wiggins?" I demanded. "Ah! He has n't told you? Thought he told you everything." This was meant for a stinger, and I felt the bite of it. "You do me too much honor. Wiggins is not a man to throw around his confidences." "And I rather fancy that his love-affairs in particular are locked in his bosom." Jewett was a master of the art of suggestion; he took an unnecessarily long time to light a cigar so that his words might sink deep into my consciousness.