-421-

He thought for a moment of seeing Mrs. Cortright next evening. had He recalled her only as a pleasant, unexciting, worthy person, but now he saw her as a Grecian vase, he saw her as a bowl of alabaster within which a fire could be lighted.

"A finish to her -- like a European," he reflected. "Yet she's American, thank God! I couldn't fall for a real European. Has to be somebody that could look at an old gray New England barn with the frost on it, in October, and get a kick out of it, without my having to explain."

His long, ambling thoughts were interrupted by his original host's inquiring:

"You been here in Venice some time?"

"Yes. Several times."

"Well, maybe you can explain -- Hope I'm not stepping all over anybody's feet, but me Well, this is the first time I've ever been abroad, and I'd always thought Venice would be kinda like a musical comedy. But of all the darn' slow places -- Why, there isn't a first-class cabaret in town! Nothing but a lot of run-down tenements with a lot of carvin's on 'em and a bunch of Chicago Drainage Ditches in between!"

"Well, I like it!"

"But what do you like about it?"

"Oh, lots of things. Especially the architecture."

But what his mind saw, as he blurted out something about being tired and took his leave, was no vision of arching bridges, of secret alleys and the quivering reflection of airy towers; it was the memory of Edith Cortright serene in her Venetian palace.

"She couldn't possible go out and grab things, like Fran," he reflected, as clumped toward the Bauer-Grünwald. "She's definitely

-422-

a great lady.' Yet I'll bet that at heart she's lonely. She wouldn't
any more than Nande would.
mind cooking for her man. Oh, damn it, Sam, why are you so simple?
Why do you insist on thinking everybody else is lonely, merely because
you are?"

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It was a small and placid dinner at Edith Cortright's, on Thursday evening. The only guests besides Sam were an English couple who were vaguely and politely something important -- very politely but very vaguely. If Sam did not find them cheery, he was amused by the pleasant carelessness of Mrs. Cortright's household.

The Fran who liked to quote poems about Gipsies and Villon and
the Brave Days When We Were Twenty-one was, in private life, a ser-
geant major. Theoretically, she was the mother confessor and breezy
confidante of all her servants, and of the plumber, the postman,
and the bootlegger. Practically she was always furious at their in-
competence. She was chummy with them only when they assured her of
her beauty and power; when the seamstress gurgled that Fran had the
most exquisite figure in Zenith, or when the corner druggist asked her
if his new hat was really correct English style.

Or so Sam brooded.

Edith Cortright seemed to have no discipline, no notion as to
her servants' duties. They argued with her. They contradicted her.
The butler said that she had ordered broccoli; and the maid came in
with clacking slippers. They were always chattering. They seemed to
be sharing some secret joke with her; and when she smiled at Sam, in
her tired way, after a voluble colloquy with the butler, he wished he
could be admitted to their tribal companionship.

A stone floor the dining-room had, and walls of hard plaster,
with strips of Syrian embroidery. About the walls were chairs, stately,
uncomfortable, inhuman. The windows, giving on the Grand Canal, were

-423-

immensely tall. It was an apartment for giants to live in. Sam felt
that into this room had strode men in armor who with gigantic obscene
laughter had discussed the torture of pale protestants against the Doge,
and that they, not so unlike Edith Cortright for all her gentleness,
had guffawed here with servants purple-uniformed, slatternly, and truc-
ulent.

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The English couple crept away early. After their flutter of good-
bye's, Sam lumbered to his feet and sighed, "I guess I'd -----"

"No. Stay half an hour."

"If you'd really ----- And how I have come to hate hotels!"

"You really liked having a home."

"I certainly did!"

"Why do you stay away from it? Isn't it -----"

Then she laughed, lighted a cigarette, held it with arching fing-
ers. "I suppose it's rather ludicrous, my trying to give advice --
and my own life such a mess that I endure it only by getting rid of
all ambition, all purpose, and just floating, trying to get along with
as little complication as possible."

They talked slowly, and mostly they talked in silence. It was
tranquil in that vast cool room above the Grand Canal. Out on the
harbor, bands of singers in gondolas chanted old Italian ballads. They
were, actually, rather commercialized, these singers; not for romance
and the love of moonlight were they warbling, and between bursts of
ecstasy they passed the hat from listening gondola to gondola, and were
much rewarded by sentimentalists from Essen, Pittsburg, and Manchester.
The songs were conscientiously banal -- "Donna è Mobile and "Santa
Lucia" for choice. Yet the whole theatric setting and the music across
the water lured Sam into a still excitement.

"I can't imagine you in any complications," he wondered.

-424-

"I shouldn't use that word, perhaps. All the complications are inside myself. It's just that certain conditions of life have rather taken my confidence in myself away from me, and I'm so afraid of doing the wrong thing that it's easier to do nothing."

"That's how I feel myself! Though with you, I can't imagine it --
you're sure of yourself."

"Not really. I'm like a man learning a new language -- he can do it beautifully as long as he can introduce the subjects of conversation and use the words he knows -- he can talk splendidly about Waiter, bring two more coffees, or What is the next train for Turin, but he's lost if somebody else asks the questions and insists on talking about anything else beyond page sixty in the Hugo Method! Here, in my own flat, with my own people, I'm safely on this side of Page Sixty, but I'd be horribly fluttered if I stepped out on Page Sixty-one! .....By the way, I shall be very happy if you're bored by your hotel here and care to come in for tea now and then."

"Awfully good of -----"

Without much consciousness of rising, he had strolled to the open window, he said, "I do appreciate it..... Feel rather at loose ends."

"Why don't you tell me about it? If you care to. I'm a good confidante!"

"Well -----" He flung out with a suicidal defiance. "I don't like to whine -- I don't think I do, much -- and I don't like admitting I'm licked. But I am. And I'm getting a little sick of not being able to sleep nights, brooding about it. Too damn much brooding probably!" He tramped out to the narrow balcony, above the canal and the sound of splashing water. On this balcony once (though Sam did not know it) Lord Byron had stood, snarling to a jet-bright lady a more pitiful and angry tale.

-425-

Edith Cortright was beside him, murmuring -- oh, her words were a commonplace "Would you like to tell me about it?" but her voice was kind, and curiously honest, curiously free of the barriers between a strange man and a strange woman. And with her Venice murmured, and the songs of love.

"Oh, it's a very ordinary story. My wife is younger than I am, and livelier, and she's found a man in Berlin, and I guess I've lost her. For keeps....Oh, I know I oughtn't to undress in public like this. But I swear I haven't before! Am I rotten to ------"

She said quickly, "Don't! Of course you're not. I'd be glad if I could tell my own story."

"Please!"

"And I haven't told people, either, not even my friends, though I suppose they guess ----- Perhaps you and I can be franker with each other because we are strangers. I do understand how you feel, Mr. Dods-worth. I suppose the people I know here and in England and at home believe that I lead such a nun-like existence because I had an idolatrous worship of the late Honorable Cecil R. A. Cortright. Such a charming man! Perfect manners, and too perfect a game of bridge! Wonderful war record -- M.C., D.S.O. Actually my husband was ----- He was a dreadful liar; one of these hand-kissing, smiling, convincing liars. He was a secret drunkard. He humiliated me constantly as a backwoods American; used to apologize to people, oh, so prettily, when I said 'I guess' instead of the equally silly 'I fancy'. And his dear mother used to congratulate me on my luck in having won her darling. Oh, I'm sorry! Beastly of me! Fatal Venetian night!"

Her quick breath was not a sob but a sound of anger. Her hand gripped the thin fluted railing of the balcony. He patted it shyly and said, as he would to his daughter Emily, "Maybe it's good for both of us to tell our troubles a little. But ----- I wish I could hate

426-

my girl. I can't. And I imagine you can't hate Cortright. Might be
good for us!

"Yes," dryly. "It would. But I'm beautifully beginning to be
able to I Have you ever seen Malapert's etchings? Let me show
you a book of them I received today."

He dutifully looked at etchings for fifteen minutes, and said
farewell rather pompously.

Trudging home, along dark pavements which hung like shelves above
swarthily glittering rios, through perilous-looking unlighted archways,
he was by turns guilty over having talked of Fran, impatient with him-
self for having too touchy a conscience, raging at the late Cecil Cort-
right as a scoundrel, and joyous that behind her fastidious reticence,
Edith Cortright could be blunt.

It was the guiltiness which persisted when he awoke. Edith would
be hating him for having blatted about Fran, for having led her to talk.
When for half an hour he had been trying to compose a note of apology,
a note came from her:

"No, you did not say anything you should not have, and I don't believe I did. I write this because I think I know how remorseful all Americans are after we have said something we really think. Put it down to Santa Lucia who, though I don't really know my hagiology, is probably the patroness of sentimentalists like you and me. Would you like to come in for tea at five today?"

Edith Cortright.

-428-

Of themselves they talked rarely, and they believed that they talked but little of Fran and Cecil Cortright. Yet, ~~except for~~ a ~~cathedral~~ tower and oysters, Vienna and jazz, a lone sentence by sentence, they told their married lives so completely that Sam began to speak of "Cecil" and Edith of "Fran" as though they four had always been together. When she realized it, Edith laughed. "We ought to make an agreement that I shall be allowed to speak of Cecil for just as many minutes as you do of Fran. Or we might compose a sort of litany --

'Oh Lord, Cecil was irritable before breakfast,

'And Lord, Thou knowest Fran did not appreciate
streamline bodies' !"

Yet there was always between them a formality, even when they used each other's first names as well as those of their eternally problematic mates. They did not discuss their souls. They did not discuss why it was that they seemed to like each other. The nearest they came to intimacy was in planning, almost childishly, their "futures."

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He said abruptly, at coffee after dinner in Edith's flat, "What shall I do? Shall I go back to America, without Fran? And shall I do the job I've been trained to, or play with some experiments? Let me tell you of a couple of silly ideas I have."

He outlined his plans for caravan building, and for venturing on San Souci Garden villages.

"Why not do both?" suggested Edith. She seemed to take his desired experiments more seriously than had Fran. "I like your idea of trying to make a suburb that would be neither stuffy nor too dreadfully arty -- grocery clerks coaxed to dance on the green. And the caravans would be fun. Cecil and I had one for two months in England."

"Do you mean to say you did the cooking?"

"Of course I did! I'm an excellent cook! I babble of Fraud and Einstein, but I know nothing about psycho-analysis, nothing about mathe-

And once she got below the surface and told him that sub-consciously he had managed to get wanted to lose Fran to Kurt, or any other available suitor.

-429-

matios. But I do know garlic and taragon vinegar! I really love housekeeping. I should have stayed in Michigan and married a small-town lawyer."

"Could you like a town like Zenith? After Venice?"

"Yes, if I had a place of my own there. Here, everything decays -- lovely decay, but I'm tired of being autumnal. I'd like hot summer growing and spring budding for a change -- even if the corn-stalks were ugly!"

Then, first, did it occur to him that it was not quite so ludicrous to think that Edith and he might some day return together to Zenith, to work and to life. He said little to himself, nothing at all to her, of what seemed dimly to be growing as a secure and healing love, yet a day or two after he seized the impulse and showed Edith the letter from Fran.

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Fran's letter revealed more of herself and of her relation to Kurt than anything she had written:

"I haven't heard from you for a week, old man, I admit I haven't been much on correspondence either but I haven't been feeling any too merry and bright, I think too much city I really must get out into the country and Kurt and I -- you really are an old darling and awfully generous I realize it to let me talk so frankly about him and still be friends with me -- we're going to try to go to the Harz mountains for a week."

"It's been a funny thing -- you always think I have no meekness but honestly I have shown quite biblical humility in trying to fit myself to his so-different life. He's let me fuss over his funny pathetic little flat -- oh Sam it just breaks my heart in the way that flat reveals how poor the poor man is, that ought to be a great nobleman like his ancestors and I suppose would have been if it hadn't been for the war"

-430-

which after all was not his fault. At first I was irritated by the
complete sloppiness etc. etc. of his dear funny old servant then I
thought maybe it was because she has such an _elementary_ kitchen equip-
ment, honestly it was about what you would expect in Kurt's native
wilds a _frightful_ old coal stove that she has to stoke up all the time
and the flues do not draw. I wanted to give him a jolly new electric
range and he finally consented, though not readily, honestly --
*I please*, pretty please, I hope this won't hurt your feelings and as I
say I know how _generous_ you are, but you can't have any idea how proud
he is! But it was the cook who balked. No! She wouldn't have a nice
new electric range or an electric dish-washing machine! She _preferred_
their own familiar things! She's truly feudal -- isn't that almost as
hard as "truly rural" that we used to say in school! -- and so is
Kurt. I think perhaps I realized that with a chauffeur, of course
Kurt can't afford his own chauffeur or even car yet though I do be-
lieve with his real genius for finance he will be a very rich man
on his own inside another ten years but he can't afford one now but
whenever he can get him he uses an Austrian chauffeur at a hire gar-
age near here that was a private in Kurt's own regiment during the
war and that really is almost practically like Kurt's own chauffeur.

Well at first do you know I was shocked by their chumminess.
The chauffeur would tell the Herr Graf that the Herr Graf was wear-
ing lovely new gloves today, and Kurt would ask him about his sweet-
heart and they would joke about it and Kurt would tell him he ought
to make his sweetheart an honest woman and the chauffeur would waggle
his finger in a knowing way that made me angry, and so one day I
jumped on Kurt about it and my dear! the way he turned on me!

He said "You are a bourgeois! I am feudal! We who are feudal
can be familiar with our servants because we know they cannot ever
be impertinent!"

-431-

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Sam laid down the letter, and it was of Edith and her way with
servants that he was thinking.

line blank

I find myself settling, dear old man no matter if we have appar-
ently busted up for keeps and it is rather tragic if one suffers one's
self to think about it after the many, many happy years we did have
together, didn't we, but if we did break up, I do know you will go on
being my friend and be glad to know that I do find myself settling
down to my job of being a European. It hasn't been easy and I can't
expect you to understand the pains, the almost agony I have given to
it. Sometimes I am frankly lonely -- for whatever you may say about
me to Tub and your dear Matey, oh Sam I suspect you talked to her in
Paris far more than you ever admitted -- but I mean, whatever
you may say about me, perhaps with a lot of justice, at least you must
admit that one of my probably few virtues has been a rather rare
frankness and honesty, and frankly at times I have been very lonely,
have wished you were here so I could tousle your funny old thick
hair. And sometimes I have been frightened by the spectacle of one
lone femme Americaine facing all of censorious Europe. And sometimes --
you know his dear childish enthusiasm without very much discrimination--
I have been a little bored by some of Kurt's Dear Old Friends. Yet I
love and I think I am coming to really understand the thickness of
European life. Our American life is so thin, so without tradition.

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Sam laid down the letter again and thought of the tradition of
pioneers pushing to the Westward, across the Alleghanies, through the
forests of Kentucky and Tennessee, on to the bleeding plains of Kansas,
on to Oregon and California, a religious procession, sleeping always
in danger, never resting, and opening a new home for a hundred million

-432-

people. But with no comment he read on:

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I have learned, and I must say with some surprise which has probably been good for my little ego, that Kurt thinks much more of a violinist or a chemist than of the nicest prince with the most quarteriest quarterings living. And -- for whatever you may think about me you must admit that I _do_ understand the Europeans and I really _am_ European! -- and do grasp it -- I haven't had too much difficulty following him. Oh, my dear, do forgive me if this hurts you, but he is what the romantic novelists call _my man_! I have some stunning plans for him. I think I see the way, I can't of course give away any details even to you, but I think I see a way of getting a certain great American bank to establish a branch in Berlin, and -- making Kurt the head of it.

You would probably be amused you certainly wouldn't know your wild Fran how meek she is if you saw her letting Kurt boss her in all sorts of little things yes and I suppose big ones too but still he _is_ so dear -- he always notices what I wear, honestly he bullies me really dreadfully about my clothes but at the same time is always willing to go shopping with me which you must admit, for all your gorgeous bigness you never were. Oh my dear I suppose it is unpardonable to write to _you_ about _him_ this way and if I stop to think about it and re-read this letter probably I never shall mail this letter that I'm writing in my ducky little coloraturo (or is it coloratura) flat on an evening that if I must confess is a little lonely and makes me feel like a lost lorn tourist _American_ but we are friends aren't we -- phone ringing must answer bless you F.

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He had the letter at ten in the morning. At twelve he was ringing at Edith's flat. He thrust Fran's letter at her without a word. When Edith had read it she sighed, and suggested:

-433-

"It's so hot here. I've been thinking of going down to Naples --
to Posillipo, out on the point, where it's cool -- and taking a little
house on the estate of the Ercoles. Baron Ercole has a big place, but
he's frightfully poor. He's an ex-diplomat; he teaches law in the
University of Naples; and the poor darlings live mostly by renting
villas on their place. Why don't you come down with me? I don't think
there's much more to be said about your Fran, after this letter. It
might be good for you to swim and sail at Naples, instead of sitting
here brooding. Would you like to come?"

"Decidedly! But what about your friends who are so eager to be
scandalized -- -- --"

"Oh, not the Ercoles. They'll believe I'm having an affair with
you, and be delighted -- they've lived in too many countries, in the
diplomatic corps, to have many morals. They'll like you. Edmondo
Ercole and you will have such a good time being silent together! Oh,
that sounds like Fran, I imagine! I'm sorry!"

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In the sunset an Italian hilltown, battlements and a shaggy tower
on a rock abrupt amid the sloping plain. The windows of the town took
the low sunlight and blazed one after another as the train passed.
"As though the houses were full of people," said Edith. He
looked at it with still pleasure. He felt that her presence had
unlocked his heart; had enabled him, for the first time, to see Italy.

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He had, theoretically, been in Naples before, but as they drove
from the station to the Villa Ercole he realized that all he had seen--
all he had seen anywhere in Europe -- was the place itself but
Fran's hectic and demanding attitudes; her hysteria of delight over
a moonlight, or her hysteria of annoyance over bad service. In Edith's
quiet presence he perceived that Naples was not, as he had remembered

-434-

it, a rather grim, very modern barricade of tall apartment houses, but
a series of connected villages extending for miles along the bay, be-
tween blue water and hills into which human beings had burrowed like
gophers.

The driver of their taxi, being Neapolitan, was in a rage so long
as any vehicle was on the road ahead of him, and as that was always,
their journey was a series of escapes from death. Yet even in this char-
lot race, Sam expanded and nestled into contentment, as in the old days
of overwork and brief vacations he had relaxed into delight on his
holidays in a canoe.

He patted Edith's hand in an effort to express his happiness, as
he saw Vesuvius roll up, with its trail of smoke -- toward Naples, now,
promising good weather; saw Capri with the dots of white houses on the
lofty plateau between the ruin-dotted mountains; saw sun-washed Sorrento
at the foot of its giant promontory; saw the villas of Posillipo below
the cliff up which their taxi was racing.

The taxi passed a yellow plaster gatehouse, with a bobbing con-
cierge -- a smiling, life-loving, plump Italian woman, with innumerable
children about her -- and instantly they were free of the roaring thor-
oughfare, free of banging traffic, ejaculatory drivers, shouldering
trams, suicidal children, and cluttered little shops for the sale of
charcoal and wine. The park of the Villa Ercole dropped from that high-
lying thoroughfare <u>sharply</u> down to the bay, with a roadway twisting and
redoubling on itself like a mountain trail. They sped among enormous
pines, between whose framing trunks he saw, across the suave bay, the
bulk of Vesuvius, as absolute in its loneliness as <u>Fujirama</u>. They
passed half a dozen plaster villas, yellow as old gold, very still,
remembering glories not quite past. In a modern stone wall, support-
ing a stretch of the corkscrew road, was a patch of thin ancient Roman
brick set in a herring-bone pattern and above it the fragment of a

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marble bust, the head of a warrior whose villa may have stood here two
thousand years ago.

There was no sound, even of birds, no sound from the street above--
a minute away yet inconceivably far.

"Lord how quiet it is here!" said Sam.

"That's why I wanted to come here -- that and the Ercoles."

On the last sweeping curve of the driveway, just before it came to
an end before the tall chateau in which the Ercoles themselves still
dwelt, Edith bade the driver halt at a tiny wooden bridge which led
across to what seemed to be the top story of a yellow plaster tower
whose lower stages were hidden beneath the cliff beside them.

"There's our house!" she said. "It's the funniest house in the
world! It's on three levels. The garden is so steep that you can
enter it from any floor. And there are really only about two rooms
to a floor."

She led him, across the bridge and along a toy-house hallway, to
the simplest of bedrooms. The floor was of shining stone; on the
walls there were no pictures, but only a majolica Virgin and Child.
The high narrow bed, with neither headboard nor footboard, had four
slender posts at the corners. It was covered with a gold encrusted
brocade, rather worn. There was a naked-looking white steel wash-
stand, a fine oval mirror, two heavy brocade chairs, a heavy oak table
set out with pens and stationery, a brazier for charcoal, and nothing
else whatever -- yet there was everything, for outside the French
windows was a terrace, apparently the roof of a room below, which gave
on the bay, so that the room was filled with the sparkle of southern
sun on southern waters and with the image of Mount Vesuvius and its
distant indolence of smoke.

"This is your room, I suppose," said Edith. "But good heavens,

-438-

CHAPTER 34

He found a new Edith Cortright, a surprisingly vigorous and out-door Edith, once she was away from Venetian proprieties. She gave up soft black for a linen sailor-blouse and a shocking skirt; she showed a talent for swimming, sailing, tennis, and managing the house. The Ercole estate, with its half a dozen villas, was like a private village, and a hectic village life it was into which Sam had come. The smiling Italian servants walked without warning into any room, at any time -- embarrassed him by bouncing into his bedroom when he was shaving, cheerfully conducted the fish-pedlar into the drawing-room at tea-time, and at all hours, under all windows, squabbled and laughed and gabbled and made love and sang. And there were so many of them belonging to the various villas. Sam was always discovering some new cottage -- half-dug in the cliffs, or atop a coach house, or mysteriously under it with its door opening on another level -- filled with gardeners or gatekeepers or maids, with their children, their goats, their puppies, their rabbits, and long-faced Italian cats.

The Baron and Baroness Ercole and their friends -- officers who came out from the barracks, navy officers, young professors from the university -- were as gay and welcoming as any American country club set priding itself on hospitality. They played tennis, they organized dances, they motored (at appalling speed) to festivals in distant mountain villages, and in everything they made Edith and Sam a part of

-439-

their own. Half of them did not speak English, but their smiles rec-
ognized him as an old friend.

Alone, Edith and Sam explored Capri and Sorrento and Pompei;
were drawn up to the terror and fumes of Vesuvius; crept through the
back alleys of old Naples, where one street is given up to fish, one
to vegetables, one to the most cheerfully lugubrious artificial funer-
al wreaths and to votive pictures depicting the escape of pious per-
sons from shipwreck, runaway horses, and falling bricks through the
intervention of the saints.

Fran, who insisted that she "despised sight-seeing," had yet been
so ejaculatory, so insistent, that he should realize to the full whatever most
struck her, that he had had to work hard at travel, and had been con-
scious only of collecting unrelated impressions. Edith was lazily
indifferent to his liking things. With her, he let his mind loaf, and
slowly some sense of the real Italy came to him, some feeling that it
was not a picturesque show but a normal and eager life.

They came home, dusty from Naples, for tea in the dim huge room
looking on the bay. The late-afternoon glow over the piled hill of
Naples faded to misty blue. The last high light in the scene was
the smoke of Vesuvius, a fabulous flamingo hue in the vanishing sun-
light. As the bay turned to a blue fabric woven with silver threads,
the lights of braziers came out cheerfully in the little fishing
boats. And in the twilight hush, Edith's voice was quiet, not prick-
ing him with demands for admiration of her cleverness, her singular
charms, but assuring him (though actually she talked only of the
Ercoles, perhaps, or politics, or antipasto) that she was happy to
be with him, that she took strength from him by giving him strength.

He assumed that he was strong and primitive as the west wind,
that she was sophisticated and fragile, utterly a creature of indoors,

-440-

and he was the more startled on the day when they rested on the stone wall by the orange grove. It was an ancient, crumbly, slatternly stone wall, lizards darting from the crevices, moss and tiny weeds like a velvet cushion along the top. Below, in the hollow, was a tile and plaster house of three irregular flat-roofed and terraced stories, apparently not connected, entered by doorways above crazy stone flights of steps, all curiously like a New Mexican pueblo. The grove climbed from the hollow to the highway above -- orange trees, lemons, a palmetto or two, with vines stretched upon the elongated branches of mulberry trees. Where a group of boulders intruded on the slope, the earth between rocks had been painfully turned into tiny vineyards, a yard or two square, protected by little stone walls. The grove suggested centuries of minute and patient labor, yet it was disorderly, the ground rough and littered, the trees a tangle, with no straight lines.

"You wondered," said Edith, perched on the wall, "whether I could stand a canoe trip, sleeping on the ground. What do you think of this orchard?"

"Don't quite see the connection."

"What do you think of it? How does it strike you -- as an efficient person?"

"Well, the fruit looks all right, but it seems kind of higgledypiggledy. And it's darned hot, here on this wall!"

"Exactly! Well, the Italian peasant loves the heat, and he loves just the bare ridged ground -- the earth, earthy earth! He loves earth and sun and wind and rain. He's a mystic, in the highest sense of that badly escorted word. The European is the same everywhere, in that. The Tyrolean love the sharp smell of the glaciers, the ragged mountain-slopes that almost frighten me, so that they die of homesickness abroad. The Prussian loves that thick sandy waste and the

-441-

bleak little pines. The French villager doesn't mind the reality of manure piles and mud puddles in front of his house. The English farmer loves his bare downs with their sharp little furze bushes. They love earth and wind and rain and sun. And I've learned it from them. You wonder if I could 'stand' sleeping on the ground! I'd love it so much more than you! I'm so much more elementary. Here, we may have ruins and painting, but behind them we're so much closer to the eternal elements than you Americans. You don't love earth, you don't love the wind ---"

"Oh, look here now! What about our millions of acres of plowed fields? Nothing like it, outside of maybe Russia! What about our most important men, that get out in the fresh air and motor and golf---"

"No. Your farmers want to get away from their wash of acres to the city. Your business men drive out to the golf club in closed sedans, and they don't want just bare earth -- they want the earth of the golf course all neatly concealed by lawn. And I -- you think of me as sitting in drawing rooms, but here you've seen me reveling in sea water and running on the beach. And often and often when you think I'm napping in my room, I sneak out to that little bit of walled-off garden just above the house and lie there in the hot sun, in the wind, smelling of the reeking earth, finding life! That's the strength of Europe -- not its so-called 'culture,' its galleries and neat voices and knowledge of language, but it's nearness to earth. And that's the weakness of America -- not it's noisiness and its cruelty and its cinema vulgarity, but the way in which it erects steel-and-glass skyscrapers and miraculous cement-and-glass factories and tiled kitchens and wireless antennae and popular magazines to insulate it from the good vulgarity of earth!"

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He wondered about it. He admitted that he had seen only an in-

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door Europe. With hotel lounges, restaurants, bedrooms, train coupés, even galleries and cathedrals and a few authentic homes, he was familiar enough. But he realized that he had but little sense of the smell of earth in the changing countries. He could remember St. Stefan's Kirche in Vienna, but he could not remember the colors of the Austrian Alps, the sound of mountain streams, the changing smell of the crowded and musty pines at dawn, at noon, and in the dusk. He had talked with Spanish waiters but he had not been silent with Spanish peasants.

Perhaps, as she said, it was he who was the decadent and ephemeral flower of an imperiled civilization and she who was the root, not to be killed; he saw that she had more essential lustiness than he, more endurance than the lively but glass-encased Fran, vigorous enough in joy but wilting and whimpering under trials. The Ercoles, Kurt von Obersdorf, Lord Herndon, they were not to be crushed. In humility he turned to the eternal earth, which he need not have journeyed from Zenith to Naples to discover, and in the earth he found contentment. He had daily less need to "buzz out and look at things," as Fran put it. He sat for hours with Edith, or alone by the bay, looking at the miraculously involved branches of a cypress, discovering the myriad minute skyscrapers in a patch of moss. And he began to desire to have -- with Edith -- a farm at home, and not a gentleman's show-place, to increase social credit, but an authentic farm, smelling of horses and cattle and chickens, with cornfields baking at noon, mysterious in their jungle-like alleys. This simple-hearted ambition stirred him more, gave him more feeling that he had something secret and exciting to live for, than any of the business plans which were rousing him again to self-respect....But it must be with Edith.... He smiled a little to think of himself, this bucolic lump, drawn back to earth by her thin unearthen hands. Edith! He understood

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better the slim starry Virgins before whom sun-black peasants bowed in Italian chapels.

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He asked himself, then, "Am I in love with Edith -- whatever this 'being in love' means?"

He had never so much as kissed her; only three or four times had he even patted her hand. He felt, sometimes, that behind her reticence there could be an honest passion, uncramped by the desire to make an impression, but he drifted on in a curious contented languor, willing to wait for exaltation. He found that when she was away, he missed her -- had every moment some idea or observation he desired to share with her. But that was to him a lesser hint of what Edith Cortright had done to him than his increase in self-confidence.

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It took him a time to perceive that perhaps he really was accepted by Edith, by the Ercoles, and the various Captain Counts and Professores, Dottores, whom the Ercoles knew, as something more than the provincial, insensitive, Midwestern manufacturer whom Fran had pitied. Baron Ercole did not explain with bored patience when Sam asked elementary questions about Fascismo. Edith was not tart with him when he grumbled that he did not like the Narcissus in the Naples Museum.

They did not expect him to be an authority on sculpture, Chianti, Roman history, or the ranks of Italian nobility. Apparently they not only expected him to be precisely what he was, but admired him for it. He was at first embarrassed, rather suspicious, by the Barness Ercole's admiration of him as a strong oarsman, a kindly companion, a frank talker, a sound financier, and a good manufacturer, but day by day he saw that she meant it. In this most Italian Italy he might without apology still be a most American American. Light seemed to be woven into the very texture of his face that these months past had

-444-

been heavy and lifeless and unhealthily flushed; and his eyes flickered
as of old they had in talk with his daughter Emily.

"You are real," they all said, in one way or another, and "I am
real!" he began to gloat.

He slept tranquilly, conscious in his sleep of the security of
Edith's presence on the floor below, shielding him against terror.
He did not awake now at three, for a cigarette and brooding about
Fran.

Only -- once, late at night, he thought that he heard Fran calling,
in distress, a sharp, beseeching "Sam -- oh Sam!" and he sprang up,
stood swaying, bewildered as he realized that she was not with him,
probably never would be again.

And the time, which he forgot as soon as possible, when Edith came
into the room when he was writing and he raised his head, smiling, with
"my Fran!"

Edith's only effort to correct his provincial ways was in a gentle
urging, "Let yourself enjoy life, Sam! You're typically American in
being burdened with a sense of guilt, no matter what you do or you don't
do."

This may conceivably have had some connection with the fact that
when he appeared with Edith, when they went to dinner with one of the
Ercoles' friends or to the Excelsior for tea, more people looked in-
terestedly at him, standing casually beside her, than in the days when
he had been anxious to make an impression for Fran's sake. He no long-
er minded meeting strangers or having to listen to their foreign ac-
cents. He took them as they came.

He awoke one morning to lie looking at the bay and to realize that
he was definitely and positively happy.

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He had written to Fran a good deal about Edith. Fran was polite

-445-

in her comments; she sent her greetings to "Mrs. Cortright"; and she was still politer, almost effusively jolly, when she wrote to him from Berlin that she was at last suing for divorce. With the term of residence she already had, the process would take three months. She was very pleasant, almost carefree about the fact that the grounds would be desertion, and the affair free of scandal.

He remembered how excited they had been when they had gone to Chicago together and he had bought her first little string of pearls; how proud she had been of them, and how grateful.....Then he felt curiously free.

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When he reluctantly brought this desisive letter to Edith, she read it slowly, and ventured, "Do you mind awfully?"

"Oh, yes, a little."

"But it does clear things up, doesn't it. And ----- I hope it won't break your beautiful new calm!"

"I won't let it!"

"But I've seen you so badgered by her letters!"

"Yes, but ----- I say! Could you ever possibly consider going to a place like Zenith to live?"

"Of course. Do places differ so much?"

"Would it amuse you to work on a plan like these garden suburbs?"

"I don't know. It might."

It was an hour afterward, when they had pretended to keep placidly busy with books and writing letters, that Edith burst out:

"Sam! About your suburbs. Something could be done -- not just Italian villas and Swiss chalets -- for a town with a tradition of Vermont Yankees and Virginians in buckskin. Why shouldn't one help to create an authentic and unique American domestic architecture? Our sky scrapers are the first really new thing in architecture since the

-446-

Gothic cathedral, and perhaps just as beautiful! Create something nat-
ive -- and not be afraid to keep in all the plumbing and vacuum cleaners
and electric dish-washers! Dismiss the imitation chateaux. The trouble
with the rich American is that he feels uncouth and untraditional, and
so he meekly trots to Europe to buy sundials and Fifteenth Century
mantlepieces and refectory tables -- to try to buy aristocracy by buying
the aristocrats' worn-out coats. I like my Europe in Europe; at home
I'd like to watch people make something new. For example, this
your motor cars."

"Then you would like a place like Zenith, that's growing?"

"How can I tell? I'd certainly like the adventure of trying it."

He felt that her hesitation was more promising than the enthus-
iasms of Fran. Suddenly a horde of Ercoles were trouping in, planning
a swim, and no more that day, nor the next, did they speak of Fran,
of Zenith, of themselves. But when they said good night, he kissed
her hands, and her eyes dwelt upon him.

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They were dining at Bertolini's, high above Naples, looking out
toward Capri, and he was talking of possible schemes: a two-story car-
avan with a canvas-sided collapsible upper floor, so that the caravan
could pass under arches en route; a caravan that could turn into a house
boat, carrying its own hull along, collapsed; a summer resort entirely
for children whose parents were going abroad; a dozen fantastic,
probably practical plans. She was amused by them, suggested improve-
ments, and Sam was lustily content.

But after his second cognac the orchestra played selections from
the Viennese operettas which Fran loved, and he remembered how happy
he had been with Fran in Berlin, at first. It came to him that if Kurt
failed to marry her, she would be a bewildered and lonely exile; and
through the music, through the darkness beyond the music, he saw her
fleeing, a desolate wraith; and while Edith gossipped most amiably,

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Sam's heart was heavy with pity for the frightened and bewildered child, who once had laughed so eagerly with him.

But, back at the Villa Ercole, he stood with Edith on the terrace and across the wvispering darkness of the bay, he saw the cone of Vevius with a thin line of fire. "Don't worry it too much!," said Edith suddenly, and he was grateful that she understood his cloudy thoughts without making him wrap them in cloudier words.

-449-

heinously divorced, who was an American, and who was too old to bear
him heirs, would be disastrous. And she didn't spare me very much in
putting it that way, either. Not a pretty scene -- me sitting there
smoking in Kurt's flat and trying to look agreeable while she wailed
at Kurt and ignored me. And Kurt stood by her. Oh, his nice little
sentimental heart bled for me, and since then he's such a good time
being devastated and trying to take both sides at once. But he
"thought ve had better put off the marriage for maybe a couple of
years till ve von her over." God! Is he a man or a son? There
ain't going to be winning over, and no marriage! I'm sick of his
cowardice, when I risked so much, but why go into that.

If you still care to bend your Olympian head and forgive the
probably wicked and unforgivable Magdalene or however it's spelled,
I should be glad to join you again, anyway I've stopped divorce pro-
ceedings. Of course I realize that in saying this so honestly, with-
out efforts to protect myself as most women would, I risk another
humiliation at your hands such as I had from Kurt. Of course I don't
know how far you have committed yourself in the rather strange rela-
tions with this Mrs. Cortwright in which you have apparently had so
much pleasure and relief from my aggravating self, though how you
could be willing to take snubs from the highly proper Italians by thus
living with her openly instead of concealing things is be-
yond ...

Oh forgive me, forgive me, dear Sambo darling, forgive me,
your bad child Fran! I sound so beastly and snotty when in my heart
I'm desolated and scared and lost and I turn to you as the Rock of
Ages! I wrote so abominably and unjustly because I'm so wretched,
so desperate, and I won't even tear it up -- I want you to know that
if you do let your bad Fran come back, she probably hasn't learned
as much as she should in her mediocre little tragedy, she'll probably

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be just as snobbish and demanding as ever, though God knows I don't want
to be, I am so tired of thread-bare grandeurs now and want so much to be
simple and honest.

I think you will credit me with not trying to come back just because you are rich and strong, and Kurt poor and honest. It's just Oh, you know what it is! I venture to turn to you because I do know that once, anyway, you loved me a great deal. And if we could manage to stick together, it will be so much better for Brent and Emily -- oh, I know, probably it's shameless of me to speak of that so late, but it is true.

I find there is a boat leaving Hamburg September 19, Cherbourg the next day, the _Albert Johnson_ and if you _care_ to join me on it, or meet me in Paris, I should be Oh Sam, if you still do love me, you mustn't be proud, you mustn't take this chance to punish me, but come, because otherwise Oh, I don't know what I _will_ do! I've been so proud! Now I feel the world is jeering at me! I don't dare leave my flat, don't dare answer the phone and hear their pitying laughter, I have my maid answer it for me, and usually it is still Kurt, but I'll never see him again, never, he talks of killing himself but he won't -- his Mamma wouldn't let him!

As soon as you get this, won't you please telephone me here,
from Naples.

If you feel like coming, I hope this will not inconvenience your
hostess, Mrs. Cortright, whom I remember so agreeably in Venice, kindly
give her my regards. But I hope that my appeal may be somewhat more
important to you than even your social duty to that doubtless most charming
lady who is I am sure much less irritating than I.

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Her whole handwriting changed then; he felt that the rest of the
letter had been written hours later:

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Oh Sam I do need you so, did I ever tell you that I adore you?

Your shamed and wretched little Fran.

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He blundered down to the drawing-room, snorting, "Got to run into Naples. May be late for tea. Don't wait."

"What is it?"

"Oh, it's nothing."

He fled from her.

All the way down, on the tram, he asked himself whether he wanted to have Fran again, and whether he was really going to join her, and to both he answered with perfect blankness. But when he asked whether he wanted to leave Edith, he denied it, sharply, with fury, reflecting wretchedly how good she had been, how honest, how understanding, and perceiving there was rising in him a passion for her greater than the mystic vexation with which Fran had fascinated him. And he was going to desert Edith, going to be weak enough to betray her?

"Oh, probably," he sighed, when for an hour, at the American Express, he had been waiting for the telephone call to Berlin.

He seemed to wait forever.

He was as conscious of the scene in the express office as though he had sat there for years. A picture of a big New York Central locomotive. Racks of pamphlets about spicy places -- Burma and Bangkok and Sao Paulo -- he would never see them now, because Fran would find them crude and unfashionable. A tourist lady writing letters and between sentences boasting to her mother of the *won-derful* corals she had found on the Piazza dei Martire --

Then startlingly, "Your Berlin call!"

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He heard Fran's voice, quicksilver voice, eagerness of the wildly playing child in its lifting mutations: "Oh, Sam, it really

-452-

is you? You really are coming, dearest? You do forgive poor Fran?"

"Sure. Be on the boat. On the boat. Yes, the nineteenth, yes, sure, we'll talk over everything, good bye, honey, you better get the tickets as you're there in Germany. Get the steamer tickets, good bye, honey, I'll wire you a confirmation."

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He walked back most of the way, looking old and slow and sweaty, laboring over the scene with Edith. She would be very polite but surprise, contemptuous of him for returning to the servitude of Fran's witchery.

He slunk in a few minutes after six.

She was reading by the great window in the drawing-room. She glanced up, then, wondering, "What is it? What's happened?"

"Well ——" He stood by the window, making much of clipping and lighting a cigar, and he did not look at her as he grumbled, "Fran's lover, this Count Obersdorf, has turned her down. His mother thought she was kind of declassé — divorce and all that. Poor kid, that must have been hard on her. She's given up the idea of divorce, and she's sailing for home. She'll be kind of — Oh, people talk a lot, I guess. I'm afraid I'll have to go with her. Fact, I'll have to catch the midnight for Rome, tonight....I wish there were some way of telling you all that you've ——"

"Sam!" She had sprung up. He was astonished by the fury in her quiet eyes. "I won't let you go back to that woman! And I won't see you killed — yes, killed! — by her sweet, gay, well-mannered, utter damned selfishness! Her only thought about anybody is what they give her! The world offers you sun and wind, and Fran offers you death, fear and death! Oh, I'd seen how you've aged five years in five minutes, after one of her complaining letters! And you won't be helping her — you'll just make her feel all the more that she can do any

-453-

selfish, cruel thing she wants to and come out of it unscathed! Think of Peking and Cairo! No, I think of the farm you could have in Michigan, among the pines! Think of how natural and contented you'd be -- yes, we'd be -- back there ----"

"I know, Edith; I know every bit of it. I just can't help it. She's my child. I've got to take care of her."

"Yes. Well." The passion did not fade from her eyes, but snapped out, as though one should turn off a light, and she said dully, "Sorry. I was probably impertinent. At least let me help you pack."

Throughout the packing, dinner, and the rather dreadful waiting afterward, when he could not find two civil words to put together, she was a little abrupt of speech, very courteous. She asked questions about Zenith. She politely hoped that she might see him "and Mrs. Dods-worth" some distant day. Only once was she near to intimacy, when, after a torturing pause, she blurted, "There really isn't much to say, is there?" But I do want you to know that because you've seemed to like me, you've given me a new assurance." [When he tried to counter with florid compliments, she bustled out to the kitchen.]

The sound of the coming taxicab released him from the eternity of sitting dead in a tomb. While the servants straggled out with his luggage, he held her hand, patting it.

"It is all ready, Signore," said the maid. She received the highly expected tip, and with a "Com' beck soon!" which sounded sincere, she vanished.

In the twilight outside the tree-shadowed door, he awkwardly shook hands with Edith, but while he was trying to say something agreeable, she cried:

"It's too late now. But I thought that some day ---- I thought it would be easy for me to talk, and I would tell you all sorts of

-454-

things about how I feel and think, so easily and simply. That it's
been pleasant to be with you. That you're bigger than you know, not
smaller, like celebrities. That you've made me willing to stop being
afraid of the world, and to attack it again. I've felt -----" She
seized his rough sleeve. "That curious feeling -- always a surprise
every time I was with you, of 'Why, it's you!' That feeling you were
different from any other living person -- not necessarily one bit
finer but -- oh, different! I shouldn't say any of this, but before
it's quite too late -- too late! -- I want to try to be reckless.
But I can't say any of the things I thought. Bless you, my very
dear! And God keep you through the wickedness of this Happy Ending!"

He kissed her, a terrible clinging kiss, and lumbered over to
the roadway and his taxicab. He looked back. She seemed to start
toward him, then closed the door quickly. Through a window he heard
her voice, weary and spiritless: "Only one for breakfast, Teresa."

He was alone with a yawning taxi-driver, as a breeze came up
from the bay, in the Southern darkness.

-456-

my _dear_, will you regard her shoes! Why they _allow_ people like that
in the first cabin?) And you can't know how I got of sticking
tired
around Berlin forever 'n' ever! Oh, you were so right about Kurt,
Sam dear. I don't know how you guessed it! You'd be the first to
admit you aren't usually so _awfully_ good at judging character, except
in the case of business men, but you were right with — Oh, he was
so _bossy_! He was furious if I so much as suggested I'd like to run
down to Baden-Baden by myself. And where he got the idea that he was
so important — Oh, his family may be as old as the Coliseum — the
Coliseo — but when I saw his mother, my _dear_, the most awful old
country frump —

"Don't!" said Sam. "Don't know why, but I kind of hate to hear
you riding Kurt and his mother that way. They were probably hurt,
too."

Most graciously, quite forgivingly, "Yes, you're right. Sorry,
M'sieu! I'll be a good girl. And of course everything is all right
now. After all, it's such a wonderful Happy Ending to our wild little
escapades! We've both learned lots, don't you think? and now I won't
be so flighty and you won't be so irritable, I'm sure you won't."

There was dancing in the verandah café. Young Tom Allen, the
polo player — young Tom, all black and ivory and grin — came to ask
her to dance. She smiled up at him, airily patted Sam's arm, and
scampered away, lightly patting Sam on the back, while Tom seemed to be hold-
ing her hand under shelter of her squirrel robe.

The sunset was angry now, the color of port wine.

Sam staggered around and around the slanting deck, alone, and
alone he stood aft, looking back in the direction of Europe. But
there was only foggy gray.

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He awoke, bewildered, at two in the morning. The storm had come;

-457-

the steamer was pitching abominably. In his half sleep he heard Edith whimpering in her sleep in the twin bed beside him. Smiling, glad to comfort her who had been all comfort to him here in sun-bright Naples, he stretched out his arm, sleepily stroked her thin arm.

He startled, he sat up and gasped, at the astonishment of hearing the voice of Fran.

"Oh, thank you! Nice of you to wake me up. Having a kind of nightmare. My, it's rough!"

In his agitation he tightened his fingers on her arm.

"Oh, Sam, don't be ardent! Not yet. I must get used to it—And I'm so sleepy!" Very brightly: "You don't mind, do you? Nighty-night!"

He lay awake. In the watery light from the transom he saw the sheen of her silver toilet things on the dresser. He thought of this tremendous steamer, pounding the waves. He thought of the modern miracle of the radio, up above, of the automatic electric steering apparatus. Yet on the bridge were sailors, unautomatic, human, eternal. The ship, too, was eternal, as a vehicle of man's old voyaging. Its creaking seemed to him like the creaking of an ancient Greek trireme.

But while his thoughts reached out thus for things heroic amid the creaking, all the while he heard her placid breathing and he smelled not the sea gale but perfume that came from little crystal vials among her silver toilet things that were vaster than the hull of the steamer, stronger than the storm.

He felt that he would never sleep again.

He closed his great fist, tight. Then it relaxed, and he was asleep.

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-459-

waves, at the foam hurled over the forepeak, at a desolate immigrant in
a tattered old raincoat trying to keep a footing on the forward deck.

It was black ahead. To a landsman it was menacing. Yet there was
strength in the stormy air and, after a long breath, stretching out his
great arms, Sam began to plow around the deck.

His eyes seemed turned inward; his lips moved a little in his
meditation.

After half an hour, breakfastless, he suddenly climbed the stairs
from A deck to the Boat deck and, down a narrow corridor past the tiny
florist-shop, came to the wireless bureau -- a narrow desk across a
small room, like a telegraph office in a minor hotel. Emotionlessly,
he wrote and handed in a message to Edith Cortright: "Will you be
Naples three weeks from now?"

He went down to breakfast. All morning and half the afternoon he
played bridge, watching Fran flirt with the ebullient Tom Allen. The
answer to his radio came just before tea-time: "No but shall be Ven-
ice for couple months bless you Edith."

For an hour, while Fran made much of tea with half a dozen men,
Sam sat alone in the smoking-room, pretending to read whenever any
lone and necessitous drinker came in to look for a drinking companion.

At the dressing-hour, he said mildly to Fran, "I wonder if we
mightn't have dinner here in our stateroom tonight? I want to talk
about things. We've sort of avoided it."

"Good Heavens, Sambo, what's come over you? Do you regard it as
particularly cheerful to dine in this beastly little hole of a room on
a rough night like this? Besides! I promised the Ballards we'd join
them in the grill for dinner -- such a common, stupid commercial crowd
in the salon."

"But we must talk."

-460-

"My dear man, I think we'll manage it, with four full days ahead of us on this steamer! I'm really not going off to the Riviera or any place, you know!"

It was not till late in the evening that he had his chance. As they came down to the stateroom at bedtime, Fran very lively after a session in the smoking room, he said, without prelude:

"Not much use trying to do it tactfully. Been trying to, but----
Fran, we can't make a go of it, and I'm going back and join Edith
Cortright we'll be married, or I hope so, any way."

"I don't quite understand. What have I done now? Oh my God, if you haven't learned You haven't learned anything, not one single thing, out of all our sorrows! Still criticizing me, and such a kind sweet way of springing something beastly cruel on me just when I've been happy, as I have tonight!" She faced him, hands clenched. "Will you kindly, Mr. Dodsworth, be a little less mysterious and tell me just what it is I've done to hurt your tender little feelings this time?"

"Nothing. We just can't make a go of it. You don't get me. I'm not making a scene. I'm not trying to bully you. I meant just what I said. I'm going back to Italy, from New York, on the first ship. I'm not blaming or criticizing ---"

She sat abruptly on the chair before her dressing-table. She said quietly, with fear edging her voice, "And what is to become of me?"

"I don't know. If I did, I wouldn't have met you on the ship."

She moaned. "Oh! You do manage to hurt! I congratulate you!

You see, I've been flattering myself you really wanted to come back to me."

He started to say something comforting, then held it back in panic, as if in danger. "I'm not going to be polite, Fran. You

-461-

I'VE loved you, a good many years. You tampered with it.
know how awfully
.....What's going to become of you? I don't know. But I
that has been becoming of you this past couple of years. You haven't
needed me. You've found people to play with, and plenty of beaux. I
suppose you'll go on finding them ---"

"And this is the man that 'loved me awfully' ---"

"Wait! For the first time in all our arguments, I'm going to
think of what would become of me! I can't help you. I'm just your
attendant. But me -- you can kill me. I didn't used to mind your
embarrassing me and continually putting me in my place. Didn't even
know you were doing it. But I do now, and I won't stand it!"

"Was it your dear Mrs. Cortright who taught you that lovely
theory? about embarrassing you? After the years when I've never al-
lowed one single soul to criticize you ---"

"Understand? I'm finished!"

He did not, unfortunately, leave her in any heroic and dignified
way. He flounced out of the stateroom like a child in a tantrum. And
that was because he knew that only by childish violence could he es-
cape from her logic, and because he knew that he must escape, even over
the side of the lurching ship. For she was indeed perfectly logical
and sound; she knew what she wanted!

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It was misery for him to look out at her from the taxicab which
he was taking to the Italian Line dock, after three days in New York;
to see her standing in front of the hotel, alone, deserted, her eyes
pitiful, and to realize that he might never see her again. The look
in her eyes had been the meaning of life for him, and he was deserting
it.

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They were dining at the Ritz in Paris, Edith and Sam, feeling

-462-

superior to its pretentiousness, because that evening they had deter-
ined to return to America, when his divorce was complete, and to find
a farm, as a retreat between crises in the manufacture of caravans.
They were gay, well-dined and well content.

But after his second cognac the orchestra played selections from Viennese operettas, and he remembered how happy Fran and he had been in Berlin. He remembered the wretchedness of the letter he had received from her that day. She was staying with Emily in Zenith; she said that she was seeing no one; that his "dear friends Tub and Matey" were a little too polite; and that she was thinking of going, in a few days, to Italy ---

Through the darkness beyond the music, he saw her fleeing, a
desolate wraith, and his heart was heavy with pity for the frightened
and bewildered child who once had laughed so eagerly with him.

He came out of his silence with a consciousness that Edith was
watching him. She said lightly, "You enjoy being sad about her...
But hereafter, every time there is a music, I shall also think of
Cecil Cortright. How handsome he was! He spoke five languages! How
impatient I was with him! How I failed him! How virtuous it makes
me feel to flay myself! What a splendid, uncommon grief I have! Dear
Sam! What a job it is to give up the superiority of being miserable
and self-sacrificing!"

He stared, he pondered, he suddenly laughed, and in that laughter
found a youthfulness he had never known in his solemn youth. He was,
indeed, so confidently happy that he forgot Fran and did not again
yearn over her, for almost two days.

THE END