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“After that, then?” she suggested.

“For me,” said Saunders Rook, “there will be no ‘after that.’ ”

Her blue eyes were full of sympathy.

“It seems too bad,” she said. “You are still so young.”

He smiled a smile of practised cynicism.

“In years, perhaps,” he said.

He saw that he had moved her.

Decidedly, this new rôle of his was worth playing, said Saunders Rook to himself as he donned his dinner-jacket that night in preparation for his dinner with Max Skye at the Authors’ Club. He was pleased with himself. In retrospect were the sympathetic blue eyes of Margery Storey; in prospect, a dinner among the celebrities of the Authors’ Club, into which sacred premises he had never gone physically, but solely in his most roseate imaginings.

Max Skye, who was a poet of no mean repute, introduced Saunders Rook to a group of notable men.

“This,” said Max Skye, with the air of a showman, “is Mr. Saunders Rook, who is going to commit suicide on the Fourth of July.”

Saunders Rook bowed to them; gravely they bowed back and stared at him, fascinated.