The conversation became general and we were waiting for dessert when I was able to talk with Dorothy privately again. I saw waiters serving drinks to diners at other tables and tried to catch the eye of one, but failed. Somehow I never have achieved the technique of catching a busy waiter’s eye. So I pushed back my chair and told Dorothy I was going out to the bar to fetch a drink and would she like one?

She said, “Bring me a cognac in honor of Mike,” and my hunch grew stronger that the Gods were going to be kind.

But by the time I returned with my drinks, table-hopping had begun. Dorothy’s seat was vacant when I set her glass down, and I’d hardly seated myself when Dick Carroll of Gold Medal came by and dragged me over to his table to meet a couple of girls in the editorial department. While I was there I saw Dorothy come back to her chair and take one sip of the cognac I’d brought her, and then she was up enthusiastically talking to some man I didn’t know and going away with him to meet someone at his table. And that’s the way it went on for the next couple of hours while the Edgar winners got their trophies.

Dorothy Cecil, I realized dismally as I tried to keep track of her in the crowd, was simply too popular a person for an outsider like myself to hope to get much of her time. One of the finest craftsmen in the mystery field, she was being passed from one table to another whenever I saw her. So, I gave up trying.

Again, I’m afraid I’m saying all this badly. Making a great deal more out of it than it deserves. But it is what I recall most vividly of the evening. I still think Dorothy Cecil and I might well have had a pleasant evening together if so many other people hadn’t intervened. As it was, I felt a rather galling sense of disappointment when the stage show was over and I drifted out to the bar again with two or three hundred others. It was only a little past eleven o’clock, and a lonely hotel room waited for me. I knew I could attach myself without too much trouble to many of the small groups that were congregating and planning where to go for further drinks, but somehow I was not in the mood for that.