The club was almost deserted.  The holidays had taken many of the members out of town.  Other men were taking advantage of the vacation to see the city, or to make acquaintance again with families they had hardly seen during the busy weeks before Christmas.  The room at the top of the stairs where the wives of the members were apt to meet for chocolate and to exchange the addresses of dressmakers was empty; in the reading room he found McLean.  Although not a member, McLean was a sort of honorary habitue, being allowed the privilege of the club in exchange for a dependable willingness to play at entertainments of all sorts.

It was in Peter’s mind to enlist McLean’s assistance in his difficulties.  McLean knew a good many people.  He was popular, goodlooking, and in a colony where, unlike London and Paris, the great majority were people of moderate means, he was conspicuously well off.  But he was also much younger than Peter and intolerant with the insolence of youth.  Peter was thinking hard as he took off his overcoat and ordered beer.

The boy was in love with Harmony already; Peter had seen that, as he saw many things.  How far his love might carry him, Peter had no idea.  It seemed to him, as he sat across the reading-table and studied him over his magazine, that McLean would resent bitterly the girl’s position, and that when he learned it a crisis might be precipitated.

One of three things might happen:  He might bend all his energies to second Peter’s effort to fill Anna’s place, to find the right person; he might suggest taking Anna’s place himself, and insist that his presence in the apartment would be as justifiable as Peter’s; or he might do at once the thing Peter felt he would do eventually, cut the knot of the difficulty by asking Harmony to marry him.  Peter, greeting him pleasantly, decided not to tell him anything, to keep him away if possible until the thing was straightened out, and to wait for an hour at the club in the hope that a solution might stroll in for chocolate and gossip.

In any event explanation to McLean would have required justification.  Peter disliked the idea.  He could humble himself, if necessary, to a woman; he could admit his asininity in assuming the responsibility of Jimmy, for instance, and any woman worthy of the name, or worthy of living in the house with Harmony, would understand.  But McLean was young, intolerant.  He was more than that, though Peter, concealing from himself just what Harmony meant to him, would not have admitted a rival for what he had never claimed.  But a rival the boy was.  Peter, calmly reading a magazine and drinking his Munich beer, was in the grip of the fiercest jealousy.  He turned pages automatically, to recall nothing of what he had read.