He was in an eddy again, a deep, lethargic gulf, without desire to work or write, love or dissipate.
His expression combined that of a Middle-western farmer appraising his wheat-crop and that of an actor wondering whether he is observed – the public manner of all good Americans.
Goodnight, child. This is a damn shame. Let’s drop it out of the picture.” He gave her two lines of hospital patter to go to sleep on. “So many people are going to love you and it might be nice to meet your first love all intact, emotionally too. That’s an old-fashioned idea, isn’t it?
Don’t say wife. I’m your mistress. Wife’s such un ugly word.
Many times he had tried unsuccessfully to let go his hand on her. They had many fine times together, fine talks between the loves of the white nights, but always when he turned away from her into himself he left her holding Nothing in her hands and staring at it, calling it many names, but knowing it was only the hope that he would come back soon.
Young men just don’t drift coolly out of nowhere and buy a palace on Long Island.
What a feeble thing intelligence is, with its short steps, its waverings, its pacing back and forth, its disastrous retreats!
This was his healthy state and it made him cheerful, pleasant, and very attractive to intelligent men and to all women. In this state he considered that he would one day accomplish some quiet subtle thing that the elect would deem worthy and, passing on, would join the dimmer stars in a nebulous, indeterminate heaven halfway between death and immortality.
It was as a concession to his hypochondriacal imagination that he formed the habit of reading in bed – it soothed him.
My thu-umb!” explained Julie. “Oh-h-h-h, t’urts.
She seems hopeful and normally hungry for life – even rather romantic.
A delightful sense of being very young and free in a civilization that was very old and free.
And then in a jiffy he was under the high ceiling of his great front room. This was entirely satisfactory. Here, after all, life began. Here he slept, breakfasted, read and entertained.
Very few of the people who accentuate the futility of life remarks the futility of themselves.
There was the union of his soul with Gloria’s, whose radiant fire and freshness was the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.
This general eclipse of ambition and determination and fortitude, all of the very qualities on which I have prided myself, is ridiculous, and, I must admit, somewhat obscene.
He felt persistently that the girl was beautiful – then of a sudden he understood: it was her distance, not a rare and precious distance of soul but still distance, if only in terrestrial yards. The autumn air was between them, and the roofs and the blurred voices. Yet for a not altogether explained second, posing perversely in time, his emotion had been nearer to adoration than in the deepest kiss he had ever known.
Every man is born a success, he makes himself a failure.
You’ve been drinking,” she said shortly, and then added qualitatively, “a little. You know I loathe the smell of it.
They are glad to see each other now – their eyes are full of kindness as each feels the full effect of novelty after a short separation. They are drawing a relaxation from each other’s presence, a new serenity.