He was facing social death once more. He was a man sitting utterly solo at a dinner table. The hive buzzed all around him. Everyone else was in a state of social bliss. Only he was stranded. Only he was a wallflower with no conversational mate, a social light of no wattage whatsoever in the Bavardage Celebrity Zoo…My life is coming apart!—and yet through everything else in his overloaded central nervous system burned the shame—the shame!—of social incompetence.
