o skulking about, lapping up cold mineral water
and cocking one ear to the sounds of human revelry within the Tavern.

As for his work--yes, he ought to do it.... Interest in it was already
colder; the flare-up was dying down; habitual apathy chilled it to its
embers. Indifference, ill-temper, self-pity, resentment, these were the
steps he was slowly taking backward. He took them, in their natural
sequence, one by one.

Old Squills meant well, no doubt, but he had been damned impertinent....
And why had Old Squills dragged in his sister, Sylvia?... He had paid as
much attention to her as any brother does to any sister.... And how had
she repaid him?

Head lowered doggedly against the sleet which was now falling thickly,
he shouldered his way forward, brooding on his "honour," on his sister,
on Dysart.

He had not been home in weeks; he did not know of his sister's departure
with Bunny Gray. She had left a letter at home for him, because she knew
no other addresses except his clubs; and inquiry over the telephone
elicited the information that he had not been to any of them.

But he was going to one of them now. He needed something to kill that
vichy; he'd have one more honest drink in spite of all the Old Squills
and Mulqueens in North America!

At the Cataract Club there were three fashion-haunting young men
drinking hot Scotches: Dumont, his empurpled skin distended with whiskey
and late suppers, and all his former brilliancy and wit cankered and
rotten with it, and his slim figure and clean-cut face fattened and
flabby with it; Myron Kelter, thin, elegant, exaggerated, talking
eternally about women and his successes with the frailer ones--Myron
Kelter, son of a gentleman, eking out his meagre income by fetching,
carrying, pandering to the rich, who were too fastidious to do what they
paid him for doing in their behalf; and the third, Forbes Winton,
literary dilettante, large in every feature and in waistcoat and in
gesture--large, hard, smooth--very smooth, and worth too many millions
to be contradicted when misstating facts to suit the colour of his too
luxuriant imagination.

These greeted Quest in their several and fashionably wearied manners,
inviting his soul to loaf.

Later he had a slight dispute with Winton, who surveyed him coldly, and
insolently repeated his former misstatement of a notorious fact.

"What rot!" said Quest; "I leave it to you, Kelter; am I right or not?"

Kelter began a soft and s