Page 171 - tender-is-the-night

on the fire, with an assurance chuckling inside him that he
was himself a digest of what was within the book, that he
could brief it five years from now, if it deserved to be briefed.
This went on at any odd hour, if necessary, with a floor rug
over his shoulders, with the fine quiet of the scholar which
is nearest of all things to heavenly peace— but which, as will
presently be told, had to end.
For its temporary continuance he thanked his body that
had done the flying rings at New Haven, and now swam in
the winter Danube. With Elkins, second secretary at the
Embassy, he shared an apartment, and there were two nice
girl visitors—which was that and not too much of it, nor
too much of the Embassy either. His contact with Ed El-
kins aroused in him a first faint doubt as to the quality of
his mental processes; he could not feel that they were pro-
foundly different from the thinking of Elkins—Elkins, who
would name you all the quarterbacks in New Haven for
thirty years.
‘—And Lucky Dick can’t be one of these clever men; he
must be less intact, even faintly destroyed. If life won’t do
it for him it’s not a substitute to get a disease, or a broken
heart, or an inferiority complex, though it’d be nice to build
out some broken side till it was better than the original
structure.’
He mocked at his reasoning, calling it specious and
‘American’—his criteria of uncerebral phrase-making was
that it was American. He knew, though, that the price of his
intactness was incompleteness.
‘The best I can wish you, my child,’ so said the Fairy

171