I. This is the way it began; stupidly, trivially, out of nothing, as fatal things do. I was sitting at the corner table in the hotel restaurant; I mean the left-hand corner as you enter from the hall… As if that mattered! A table in that angle, with a view over the mountains, was too good for an unaccompanied traveller, and I had it only because the head-waiter was a good-natured fellow who … As if that mattered, either! Why can’t I come to the point? The point is that, entering the restaurant that day with the doubtful step of the newly-arrived, she was given the table next to me. Colossal Event—eh? But if you’ve ever known what it is, after a winter of semi-invalidism on the Nile, to be told that, before you’re fit to go back and take up your job in New York—before that little leak in your lung is patched up tight—you’ve got to undergo another three or four months of convalescence on top of an Alp; if you’ve dragged through all those stages of recovery, first among one pack of hotel idlers, then among another, you’ll know what small incidents can become Colossal Events against the empty horizon of your idleness.
