py young people's honor, and to this dinner, as one of
Evelyn's oldest friends and of Dawson's for that matter, I had to be
asked.

In many ways, this dinner differed in my memory from other dinners. To
begin with, it was exceedingly short, and well done. The table was
decorated with that flower which some people call Johnny jump-up, and
some heartsease, and of which all that I can state positively is that
it is the great-grandmother of the pansy family. We had some tag-ends
of Moet and Chandon '84 to drink and a bottle of the old Chartreuse.
In the second place, it was the last time I was ever to sit at meat
under John Fulton's roof. The dinner had psychological peculiarities.
I was in love with my hostess; she with me. Twice I could have run
away with the girl in honor of whose engagement the dinner was being
given. My host, who personally had insisted on my presence, would have
been delighted to hear of my sudden death. The waitress would have
died for me (I had her word for it), and at the same time she despised
me. Within the week I had thrown myself on her mercy, and bought her
silence with a kiss.

What a dinner it would have been if we had elected to play truth; if
each person present could have been forced to say what he or she knew
about the others!

Personally I must have rushed out of the house, my fingers in my ears,
like Pilgrim.

But we didn't talk about embarrassing things. We made a lot of noise,
and did a lot of laughing, and toasting. But I was glad when it was
all over. I was always catching someone's eye, and thinking how much
harm a man can do, if with no will to do harm, he follows the lines of
least resistance and drifts. The harm that is done of malice and
purpose has at least a strength of conviction about it, and disregard
of consequences. It is far more respectable to do murder in cold
blood, than to slaughter a friend because you happen to be careless
with firearms.

Among other things that dinner proved to me that it is possible to do
several things at once: to laugh, talk, and think. I kept laughing and
talking and helping now and then to tease Evelyn and Dawson, and yet
all the while I was busy thinking of other things. And all the
thinking was based on one wish; not that I had never been born, but
that I had my whole life to live over again. Surely, I thought, with
another trial I might have amounted to something. I had money back of
me, I thought, and position, a