"When I had gone back to the bar to sit with McAlmon again, what happened then was in a sense a parable acted out for exactly what this man was. He had switched from gin to scotch, and we were sitting there silenced and saddened and embittered by the ugliness and the opulence of the middle-aged people. French and American and English, who danced, and ate, and drank, and threw their money away in handfuls instead of giving it to the poets and the beggars of the world. And then, between the silk draperies that completely concealed the window that stood open on the summer night (they were green, those curtains; I can see them clearly, stirring, wavering a little in the night air), suddenly a miserable hand reached in from the deserted street, a black-nailed, dirty, defeated hand, with a foul bit of shirt sleeve showing at the wrist. Without a word McAlmon placed his fine, tall glass of whiskey and soda into the fingers of the stranger's hand, and the fingers closed quickly on it and drew it back through the draperies into the lonely dark."
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