Page 288 - tender-is-the-night

Anyhow, it was a good draft of relief.
An Englishman spoke to him from across the aisle but he
found something antipathetic in the English lately. England
was like a rich man after a disastrous orgy who makes up to
the household by chatting with them individually, when it
is obvious to them that he is only trying to get back his self-
respect in order to usurp his former power.
Dick had with him what magazines were available
on the station quays: The Century, The Motion Picture,
L’lllustration, and the Fliegende Blätter, but it was more fun
to descend in his imagination into the villages and shake
hands with the rural characters. He sat in the churches as he
sat in his father’s church in Buffalo, amid the starchy must
of Sunday clothes. He listened to the wisdom of the Near
East, was Crucified, Died, and was Buried in the cheerful
church, and once more worried between five or ten cents
for the collection plate, because of the girl who sat in the
pew behind.
The Englishman suddenly borrowed his magazines with
a little small change of conversation, and Dick, glad to see
them go, thought of the voyage ahead of him. Wolf-like un-
der his sheep’s clothing of long-staple Australian wool, he
considered the world of pleasure— the incorruptible Medi-
terranean with sweet old dirt caked in the olive trees, the
peasant girl near Savona with a face as green and rose as
the color of an illuminated missal. He would take her in his
hands and snatch her across the border ...
... but there he deserted her—he must press on toward
the Isles of Greece, the cloudy waters of unfamiliar ports,

288 Tender is the Night