"About you."
"Oh!" I said with animation. "Do tell me."
"It was at lunch," she explained, "at Duke's. The people at the next table were talking about you. I couldn't help hearing a little. A man there said he had met you in Shanghai."
"Not really!" I exclaimed.
"Yes. He met you in Shanghai."
"That's frightfully interesting," I said. "What did he say about me?"
"That's what I couldn't hear," she replied. "You see I had to pay some attention to my own crowd. I only caught the word 'delightful.'"
Ever since she told me this. I have been turning it over in my mind; and it is particularly vexing not to know more. "Delightful" can be such jargon and mean nothing—or, at any rate, nothing more than amiability. Still, that is something, for one is not always amiable, even when meeting strangers. On the other hand it might be, from this man, the highest praise.
The whole thing naturally leads to thought, because I have never been farther east than Athens in my life.
Yet here is a man who met me in Shanghai. What does it mean? Can we possibly visit other cities in our sleep? Has each of us an alter ego, who can really behave, elsewhere?