you good."

Chip refused, but he long remembered why he retracted his refusal. It
was the look of his apartment when he returned to it that night. It was
an apartment in a house at the corner of Madison Avenue and a street in
the Thirties, dedicated to the use of well-to-do bachelors. It had been
a slight mitigation in the collapse of life as he had built it up, that
rooms in so comfortable a refuge should have been free for him. He had
furnished them with some care; and after his first distress had worn
off a little had found a measure of lawless satisfaction in a return to
the old unmarried ways.

But on this particular evening the aspect of the place appalled him from
the minute he turned his latch-key in the lock. Under the stimulus of
Bland's counsels he had come home early, which was in itself a mistake.
It was scarcely nine o'clock. There was an hour or an hour and a half to
pass before he could think of going to bed. Any such interval as that
was always the hardest feature in the day for him. But what smote him
specially now was the air of emptiness and loneliness. It met him as an
odor in the stale smell of the cigar he had smoked on coming up-town
from the office, and which still lingered in the rooms. He had forgotten
to open a window, and the house valet, whose duty it was to "tidy up,"
had evidently gone out.

In the small hall into which Chip entered there was a bookcase with but
two or three odds and ends of books in it, for his habits of reading had
dropped away from him with everything else. In the sitting-room one
brown shoe stood on the hearth-rug before the empty fireplace; the
other on the center-table, a collar and necktie beside it. The soiled
shirt he had thrown off lay on the couch, a sleeve dragging on the
floor. On the mantelpiece, which he had at first consecrated as a shrine
for the photographs of Edith and the children, and flanked by two silver
candlesticks like an altar, there had intruded an open box of perfectos,
an ash-tray that still held the butt-end of a cigar, and an empty
tumbler smelling of whisky. There were traces of cigar ashes
everywhere--on the arms of the easy-chairs, on the rugs, and on the
terra-cotta tiles of the hearth. For the rest the room was a litter of
newspapers, as the bedroom which opened off it was a litter of clothes.

He was not disorderly; he was only careless, and incapable of creating
order for himself. Disorder shocked him profoundly. He always sat do