look at your hair! Have you no wife, no sweetheart?”
“I haven’t a wife any longer. We are divorced. A sweetheart, yes, but she doesn’t live here. I don’t see her very often. We don’t get on very well.”
She whistled softly.
“You must be difficult if nobody sticks to you. But now tell me what was up in particular this evening? What sent you chasing round out of your wits? Down on your luck? Lost at cards?”
This was not easy to explain.
“Well,” I began, “you see, it was really a small matter. I had an invitation to dinner with a professor—I’m not one myself, by the way—and really I ought not to have gone. I’ve lost the habit of being in company and making conversation. I’ve forgotten how it’s done. As soon as I entered the house I had the feeling something would go wrong, and when I hung my hat on the peg I thought to myself that perhaps I should want it sooner than I expected. Well, at the professor’s there was a picture that stood on the table, a stupid picture. It annoyed me—”