I was still with Jordan Baker. We were sitting at a table with a man of about my age and a rowdy little girl, who gave way upon the slightest provocation to uncontrollable laughter. I was enjoying myself now. I had taken two finger-bowls of champagne, and the scene had changed before my eyes into something significant, elemental, and profound.
At a lull in the entertainment the man looked at me and smiled.
“Your face is familiar,” he said, politely. “Weren’t you in the Third Division during the war?”
“Why, yes. I was in the Ninth Machine-gun Battalion.”
“I was in the Seventh Infantry until June nineteen-eighteen. I knew I’d seen you somewhere before.”
We talked for a moment about some wet, gray little villages in France. Evidently he lived in this vicinity, for he told me that he had
