wing-room of a Pullman car by mistake,
or else, best of all, he is brought accidentally into
her room at an hotel at night. There is something about
an hotel room at night, apparently, which throws the
modern reader into convulsions. It is always easy to
arrange a scene of this sort. For example, taking the
sample beginning that I gave above, The Man, whom I left
sitting at the _cabaret_ table, above, rises unsteadily
--it is the recognised way of rising in a _cabaret_--and,
settling the reckoning with the waiter, staggers into
the street. For myself I never do a reckoning with the
waiter. I just pay the bill as he adds it, and take a
chance on it.

As The Man staggers into the "night air," the writer has
time--just a little time, for the modern reader is
impatient--to explain who he is and why he staggers. He
is rich. That goes without saying. All clean-limbed men
with straight legs are rich. He owns copper mines in
Montana. All well-tubbed millionaires do. But he has left
them, left everything, because of the Other Man's Wife.
It was that or madness--or worse. He had told himself so
a thousand times. (This little touch about "worse" is
used in all the stories. I don't just understand what
the "worse" means. But snoopopathic readers reach for it
with great readiness.) So The Man had come to New York
(the only place where stories are allowed to be laid)
under an assumed name, to forget, to drive her from his
mind. He had plunged into the mad round of--I never could
find it myself, but it must be there, and as they all
plunge into it, it must be as full of them as a sheet of
Tanglefoot is of flies.

"As The Man walked home to his hotel, the cool night air
steadied him, but his brain is still filled with the
fumes of the wine he had drunk." Notice these "fumes."
It must be great to float round with them in one's brain,
where they apparently lodge. I have often tried to find
them, but I never can. Again and again I have said,
"Waiter, bring me a Scotch whisky and soda with fumes."
But I can never get them.

Thus goes The Man to his hotel. Now it is in a room in
this same hotel that The Woman is sitting, and in which
she has crumpled up the telegram. It is to this hotel
that she has come when she left her husband, a week ago.
The readers know, without even being told, that she left
him "to work out her own salvation"--driven, by his cold
brutality, beyond the breaking-point. And there is laid
upon her soul, as s