The setting is a middle-class English restaurant. The point of view is that of a middle-aged man who is presumably the author Graham Greene himself. He is all alone and is observing the other patrons. The most conspicuous are a group of eight Japanese gentleman seated at a big table. They stand out because they are Japanese, are speaking in a foreign language, and because they are treating one another with formal manners which are rather quaint and exotic in this English setting. There is a great deal of bowing among them. Nearby is a young Englishwoman who has just sold her first novel. The reader gets the impression that the restaurant is in the heart of the London literary world, surrounded by offices of publishers, literary agents, and book dealers. The young woman is full of ambition and self-confidence, full of herself. She mentions that she has been praised for her powers of observation. Yet the whole point of the story is that this woman does not even notice the Japanese gentlemen at all. She is another mediocrity who will probably attract a certain number of readers who are as unimaginative and insensitive as she is. The story is a commentary on the literary world in general and is not too complimentary to female writers who talk glibly about superficial subjects. Obviously she does not realize what a truly difficult career she has chosen, nor does she have any conception of her own limitations. There is a strong contrast between the unobservant woman and the very perceptive and sophisticated narrator who is describing her. He is thinking that a person doesn't need brains to become a popular writer, and the profession is overcrowded and consequently precarious because so many incompetent people crowd into it. Greene chose to have this young woman speaking to her fiance at a nearby table rather than having her sitting with the narrator, as Somerset Maugham does, for example, in his misogynistic short story "The Luncheon."
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