Page 244 - tender-is-the-night

chiatrists. Like so many men he had found that he had only
one or two ideas—that his little collection of pamphlets now
in its fiftieth German edition contained the germ of all he
would ever think or know.
But he was currently uneasy about the whole thing. He
resented the wasted years at New Haven, but mostly he felt a
discrepancy between the growing luxury in which the Div-
ers lived, and the need for display which apparently went
along with it. Remembering his Rumanian friend’s story,
about the man who had worked for years on the brain of an
armadillo, he suspected that patient Germans were sitting
close to the libraries of Berlin and Vienna callously antici-
pating him. He had about decided to brief the work in its
present condition and publish it in an undocumented vol-
ume of a hundred thousand words as an introduction to
more scholarly volumes to follow.
He confirmed this decision walking around the rays
of late afternoon in his work-room. With the new plan he
could be through by spring. It seemed to him that when a
man with his energy was pursued for a year by increasing
doubts, it indicated some fault in the plan.
He laid the bars of gilded metal that he used as paper-
weights along the sheaves of notes. He swept up, for no
servant was allowed in here, treated his washroom sketchily
with Bon Ami, repaired a screen and sent off an order to a
publishing house in Zurich. Then he drank an ounce of gin
with twice as much water.
He saw Nicole in the garden. Presently he must encounter
her and the prospect gave him a leaden feeling. Before her

244 Tender is the Night