At my left sat a young man about my own age. He was also in evening dress. At my right a benevolent old gentleman, whose eye-glasses balanced neatly upon the end of his nose, was deeply interested in _The Law Journal_ and a pint pf mineral water. A little beyond my table was an exiled Frenchman, and the irritating odor of absinthe drifted at times across my nostrils. With my coffee I ordered a glass of Dantzic, and watched the flakes of beaten gold waver and settle; and presently I devoted myself entirely to my own particularly miserable thoughts.... To be in love and in debt! To be with the gods one moment and hunted by a bill-collector the next! To have the girl you love snub and dismiss you for no more lucid reason than that you did not attend the dance at the Country Club when you promised you would! It did not matter that you had a case on that night from which depended a large slice of your bread and butter; no, that did not matter. Neither did the fact that you had mixed the dates. You had promised to go, and you hadn't gone or notified the girl that you wouldn't go. Your apologetic telegram she had torn into halves and returned the following morning, together with a curt note to the effect that she could not value the friendship of a man who made and broke a promise so easily. It was all over. It was a dashed hard world. How the deuce do you win a girl, anyhow? Supposing, besides, that you possessed a rich uncle who said that on the day of your wedding he would make over to you fifty thousand in Government three per cents? Hard, wasn't it? Suppose that you were earning about two thousand a year, and that the struggle to keep up smart appearances was a keen one. Wouldn't you have been eager to marry, especially the girl you loved? A man can not buy flowers twice a week, dine before and take supper after the theater twice a week, belong (and pay dues and house-accounts) to a country club, a town club and keep respectable bachelor apartments on two thousand ... and save anything. And suppose the girl was independently rich? Heigh-ho! I find that a man needs more money in love than he does in debt. This is not to say that I was ever very hard pressed; but I hated to pay ten dollars "on account" when the total was only twenty. You understand me, don't you? If you don't, somebody who reads this will. Of course, the girl knew nothing about these things. A young man always falls into the fault of magnifying his earning capacity to the girl he loves. You see, I hadn't told her yet that I loved her, though I was studying up somebody on Moral and Physical Courage for that purpose. And now it was all over! I did not care so much about my uncle's gold-bonds, but I did think a powerful lot of the girl. Why, when I recall the annoyances I've put up with from that kid brother of hers!... Pshaw, what's the use?