All this gave the impression of brusqueness.  The girl liked it.  She looked at her friend and wished she was dining with Traill.  But Traill took no notice of her.  Except an occasional glance, he ignored them both.  As soon as he could, he ordered an evening paper and sat concealed behind it—­truly British in every outline.  The music in the place was good, but no music appealed to him.  It came as a confused wreckage of sounds to his ears as he read through the news of the evening; and when the girl rattled her spoon on the coffee cup and the young man clapped his hands vigorously at the conclusion of a selection, he looked over the top of his paper with annoyance.  What music had ever penetrated his understanding of the art, had come in the form of chants of psalms and old hymn tunes, which a constant attendance at church in his youth had dinned into him—­the driving of soft iron nails into the stern oak.  He sang these laboriously with numberless crescendos as he dressed in the mornings.

He finished dinner as quickly as he could.  The young people opposite him were insufferably dull.  Apparently they had never met each other before and were at a loss to make conversation to suit the occasion.  Accordingly, they listened intently to the string band while the young man smoked a long cigar, and in the natural course of things, they applauded after each piece to show that they had heard it.  Traill bolted his meal, glad to leave them.

He came out of the restaurant and thanked God—­filling his lungs with it—­for the clean air.  Then he stood on the pavement contemplating the next move.  Should he go back to his rooms, read—­smoke—­fall asleep?  Should he turn into a music-hall?  When you live alone, the greatest issues of life sometimes resolve themselves into such questions as these.

Finally, scarcely conscious of arriving at any definite decision, he walked slowly back across the Circus in the direction of Lower Regent Street.

Over by the Criterion he heard the sound of footsteps behind him, hurrying; then his Christian name in a woman’s voice.  He turned.

“I was up nearly at the Prince of Wales’s,” she said out of breath, “when I saw you crossing the Circus.  My—­I ran!”

“What for?” he asked laconically.

“Why to talk to you, of course—­what else?  Where are you going?”

He looked at her coloured lips, at the tired eyes with their blackened lashes, at the flush of rouge that adorned her cheeks.  Involuntarily, he remembered when she was charming, pretty—­a time when she required none of these things.

“Where are you going anyway?” she repeated.  “You haven’t been to see me these months.  Where are you going now?”

“I’m going back to my rooms.”

A look of resigned disappointment passed like a shadow across her face.  The first realization in a woman of her failure to attract is the beginning of every woman’s tragedy.