found: the love of woman.

The sensation was curious--new, unique in his experience.

His cigarette burned down to his fingers as he sat pondering. Abstractedly,
he ground its fire out in an ash-tray.

The waiter set before him a silver tureen, covered.

He sat up and began to consume his soup, scarce doing it justice. His dream
troubled him--his dream of the love of woman.

From a little distance his waiter regarded him, with an air of
disappointment. In the course of an hour and a half he awoke, to discover
the attendant in the act of pouring very hot and black coffee from a bright
silver pot into a demi-tasse of fragile porcelain. Kirkwood slipped a
single lump of sugar into the cup, gave over his cigar-case to be filled,
then leaned back, deliberately lighting a long and slender panetela as a
preliminary to a last lingering appreciation of the scene of which he was a
part.

He reviewed it through narrowed eyelids, lazily; yet with some slight
surprise, seeming to see it with new vision, with eyes from which scales of
ignorance had dropped.

This long and brilliant dining-hall, with its quiet perfection of
proportion and appointment, had always gratified his love of the beautiful;
to-night it pleased him to an unusual degree. Yet it was the same as ever;
its walls tinted a deep rose, with their hangings of dull cloth-of-gold,
its lights discriminatingly clustered and discreetly shaded, redoubled in