“Do I know you?” I asked. That was my line at the time, though it has since been discarded, like all the others, due to continued and unmitigated failure.

She looked me over carefully and then gave a light toss to her oceanic hair. “No, I don’t think so,” she said.

“It was worth a try.”

“Not in this lifetime, Mr. Carl,” she said with a look that exiled me to one of the couches at the far end of the lobby.

But she was right, of course. Women like that did not exist for guys like me, they existed for the wealthy, the witty, the thrillingly articulate, for ballplayers and movie stars and presidential aides. And, of course, they were for adorning the offices of those brilliant firms like Talbott, Kittredge and Chase that refused to let me join their ranks. Oh man, I hated this place, I hated it so bad I could taste it.

“Mr. Carl,” said a pretty, sharp-suited woman who had crossed the broad expanse of lobby to the couch where I was sitting. I had been waiting for half an hour, pretending to be interested in a copy of the Wall Street Journal I picked off one of the cocktail tables in the pathetic hope that the receptionist might mistake me for a corporate client checking on the value of his stock options. “Come with me, please,” the woman in the suit said. “I’ll take you to Mr. Prescott’s office.”

I followed her up a flight of stairs and through twists and turns of broad hallways. I passed desks of grim secretaries typing efficiently into their word processors and caught glimpses of well decorated rooms from which worried associates darted back and forth. There was a hum of activity in those offices, a melange of sound emanating from the fluorescent lights, from the computer fans, from the laser printers squeezing out page after page after page, from the incessant soft ring of the phones and quiet voices explaining that Mr. Wilson or Ms. Antonelli or Mr. Schwartz was on another line but would get right back to you. To a lawyer the sound was of more than just run-of-the-mill office activity. It was the sound of billable hours, it was the sound of money. It was not a sound I heard too often. In our hallway what I heard instead was the hush of financial desperation.