"You have nearly finished," he said. "Please don't hurry. I hate to eat alone. It is a whim of mine. If I eat alone I read, and if I read I get dyspepsia. Try the oat biscuits and the Camembert."
Douglas did as the newcomer had suggested.
"I am in no hurry," he said. "I have nothing to do, nor anywhere to go."
"Lucky man!"
"You speak as though that were unusual," Douglas laughed, "but I was just thinking that every one here seems to be in the same state. Some one once told me that London was a city of sadness. Who could watch the people here and say so?"
The newcomer screwed in his eyeglass and looked deliberately round the room.
"Well," he said, "this is a resort of the poor, and the poor are seldom sad. It is the unfortunate West-Enders who carry the burdens of wealth and the obligation of position, who have earned for us the reproach of dulness. Here we are on the threshold of Bohemia. Long life and health to it."
He drank a glass of Chianti with the air of a connoisseur tasting some rare vintage.
Douglas laughed softly.
"If the people here are poor," he said, "what about me? I pawned my watch because I had had nothing to eat since yesterday."