For most of my life, I have thought of myself as what people addicted to redundancy call “a unique individual.” I recognized that I shared physical characteristics with other men, with other human beings, but I thought that my mind was mine alone. However, I find, more and more often, people who seem to think somewhat as I do, whose ideas are in harmony or in sympathy with my own. I recognize these sympathetic siblings most easily when I discover that we share the conviction that our species, overall, is beneath contempt. To my astonishment, I have even found that I seem to have a doppelgänger in Manhattan. I had seen him once at the restaurant Robetto Passon, and now I found him again at Puttanesca.
    At first I didn’t notice him. However, while I was looking at the menu, something he said caught my attention. “It is too late now,” he said. “Whatever optimism I may have had in my youth is gone. I feel about most people exactly as that character in that Galsworthy novel did. You know the one.”
    “I know the character and novel that you mean,” I said, turning toward them.
    He glared at me. Oddly, he seemed to consider me beneath contempt.
    Undeterred, I said, “It is Sir Timothy Fanfield—”
    “This is outrageous,” he muttered, glaring at me with redoubled fury and then glancing at his companion in the evident expectation that she would endorse his umbrage.
    Instead, she smiled and batted her lashes at me.
    “—and the Galsworthy novel is Swan Song,” I added.
    “Insufferable impertinence,” he muttered.
    I couldn’t restrain myself; I decided to make him squirm. “When Sir Timothy said of some coal-miners who had gone out on strike, ‘They ought to be shot.’ His uneasy interlocutor asked, ‘What about the mine-owners?’ The even-handed sir Timothy replied that he would shoot them, too. ‘We’’ll never have industrial peace until we shoot somebody.’”
    “Would you mind?” he asked.
    The fool neglected to specifiy what it was that he wondered whether I would mind, so I was free to interpret him as asking me whether I would mind continuing with more of Sir Timothy.
    “Not at all,” I said. “Sir Timothy was particularly outraged by the hypocrisy of the rich, and among the rich he singled out slumlords. ‘You want to take these scoundrels by the throat,’ he said. ‘I knew a chap that owned half a slum and had the face to ask me to subscribe to a Missionary Fund in China. I told the fellow he ought to be shot. Impudent beggar—he didn’t like it.’”
    “Impudent beggar indeed!” cried my double, tossing his napkin on the table in his fury.
    Miranda returned from the ladies’ room at that point, and I “buried my nose in my menu.”