out to him. It was obvious that that day, which she had held so dear for so long, had vanished from his memory entirely. Perhaps it had disappeared even before it was even over. After all, what were a few hours in life of a gentleman of leisure? Yet now that she actually saw him standing before her, she couldn’t hold it against him. She was glad to see Henry Mendelsohn at last, if only because it meant she could finally stop dreaming about him. Seating himself with a flourish, he called for two cups of coffee. No doubt he was a regular patron, for the waitress didn’t blink when he pulled the quarter from her nose. “I see you are still a gentleman of leisure.” He shookhis head. It was not so easy to live a life of leisure these days. He had spent several summers at the resorts of the Catskills and Pocono Mountains, he told her. In the winters he had traveled as far north as Boston and all the way south to the city of Baltimore. But the strikes had spread far and wide, and people no longer had money for leisure. So he had returned to New York and become a peddler, selling whatever he could: shoelaces, pie plates, packages of dried noodles, tortoise shell combs, and children’s tin drums and tambourines. Soon everywhere he went he was pursued by angry housewives telling him that the shoelaces they had bought only yesterday had snapped, the pie plates had cracked, the