What kind of life must that be? Eight hours up and dowp on a train, into the Railway Arms to drink yourself silly, dinner from a frying pan, a terrible hangover and then begin again. Moving from job to job, shedding friends, gathering illnesses. Chester stopped chewing for a moment and let the possibility of desolate and dreary singleness sweep over him like a gust of secondhand smoke. He had always thought that life, his life at least, would end, whatever its meanderings and false starts, in an undefined but surely well-deserved, satisfaction. Now, as he pushed on towards forty, and in the sad half-light of this disheveled steward, it began to occur to him, slowly and embarrassingly late perhaps, that this was not necessarily so. Some mistakes once made were never rectified; some chances missed would never reappear. Looked at from this perspective, life struck Chester suddenly as harsh and inadequately explained, and happiness as a matter not of time but of desperate human effort.