After a moment Tom got up and began wrapping the unopened bottle of whiskey in the towel.

“Want any of this stuff? Jordan? � Nick?”

I didn't answer.

“Nick?” He asked again.

“What?”

“Want any?”

“No � I just remembered that today's my birthday.”

I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous menacing road of a new decade.

It was seven o'clock when we got into the coup� with him and started for Long Island. Tom talked incessantly, exulting and laughing, but his voice was as remote from Jordan and me as the foreign clamor on the sidewalk or the tumult of the elevated overhead. Human sympathy has its limits and we were content to let all their tragic arguments fade with the city lights behind. Thirty —