I
An afternoon of unparalleled gloominess. It had been dark all the day long, and now toward evening a savage rain had come on, driven by a cold March wind. In his rain-coat and waterproofed boots he could in a way defy the storm, but it affected him nevertheless; it depressed him horribly.
He had been on his way home, a bit earlier than usual, sitting in the Elevated train and staring morosely out of the window at the drenched city, finding it uglier, colder, more sordid than ever before. When that curious impulse seized him, that longing he knew so well; it was a sort of spiritual thirst, an intangible desire to be assuaged by an intangible satisfaction. He got out of the train at Thirty-Eighth Street, instead of at Seventy-Second, where he belonged, and hurried east.
His destination was a little restaurant on Fourth Avenue, a compromise between the severe, white tiled cafeterias and Dairy Lunches, and the more luxurious sort. It had separate tables and table cloths, curtains across the windows and a carpet on the floor. But was, nevertheless, very cheap, and, it must be admitted, somewhat nasty. Not the place one would have picked out for a man as prosperous, as fastidious as this one.
It was very early, and the place was empty. He opened the glass door and entered, went at once to a table in a corner and took off his dripping hat and his overcoat and hung them on a brass hat-rack beside which stood a great Japanese jar for umbrellas. A man of thirty-five or so, with a neat black moustache and a dark and saturnine face, well-dressed, in a conservative sort of way.
He didn’t sit down when he had taken off his coat; he remained standing, looking about him. And in a moment a waitress came hurrying over to him, a hollow-cheeked, brown haired young woman of thirty, her fragile grace encased in a stiffly-starched white apron.
“Hello!” she said, with a serious smile.
“Hello!” he answered. “I felt I had to see you.... How are you?”
“All right, thank you! What will you have?”
“Sit down for a while!” he said. “It’s too early to eat. Anyway I’ll have to go home for dinner.”