"_I_ intend to do art criticism for the _Herald_." "What's the objection to my getting a job on it, too ?" inquired Quest, setting his empty glass aside and signalling the waiter for a re-order.
He expected surprise and congratulation.
Somebody said, "_You_ take a job!" so impudently that Quest reddened and turned, showing his narrow, defective teeth.
"It's my choice that I haven't taken one," he snarled.

"Did you think otherwise ?" "Don't get huffy, Stuyve," said a large, placid, fat novelist, whose financial success with mediocre fiction had made him no warmer favourite among his brothers.
A row of artists glanced up and coldly continued their salad, their Vandyck beards all wagging in unison.
"I want you to understand," said Quest, leaning both elbows offensively on Dill's table, "that the job I ask for I expect to get." "You might have expected that once," said the cool young man who had spoken before.
"And I do now!" retorted Quest, raising his voice.

"Why not ?" Somebody said: "You can furnish good copy, all right, Quest; you do it every day that you're not working." Quest, astonished and taken aback at such a universal revelation of the contempt in which he seemed to be held, found no reply ready--nothing at hand except another glass of whiskey and soda.
Minute after minute he sat there among them, sullen, silent, wincing, nursing his chagrin in deepening wrath and bitterness; and his clouding mind perceived in the rebuke nothing that he had ever done to deserve it.
Who the devil were these rag-tags and bob-tails of the world who presumed to snub him--these restaurant-haunting outsiders, among whom he condescended to sit, feeling always the subtle flattery they ought to accord him by virtue of a social position hopeless of attainment by any of them?
Who were they to turn on him like this when he had every reason to suppose they were not only aware of the great talent he had carelessly neglected to cultivate through all these years, but must, in the secret recesses of their grubby souls, reluctantly admire his disdain of the only distinctions they scrambled for and could ever hope for?
His black looks seemed to disturb nobody; Bunn, self-centred, cropped his salad complacently; the Vandyck beards wagged; another critic or two left, stern slaves to duty and paid ads.
* * * * * The lights bothered him; tremors crawled over and over his skin; within him a dull rage was burning--a rage directed at no one thing, but which could at any moment be focussed.
Men rose and left the table singly, by twos, in groups.

He sat, glowering, head partly averted, scowlingly aware of their going, aware of their human interest in one another but not in him, aware at last that he counted for nothing whatever among them.
Some spoke to him as they passed out; he made them no answer.

And at last he was alone.
Reaching for his empty glass, he miscalculated the distance between it and his quivering fingers; it fell and broke to pieces.