Page 299 - tender-is-the-night

When I could have had a good share of the pretty women of
my time for the asking, why start that now? With a wraith,
with a fragment of my desire? Why?
His imagination pushed ahead—the old asceticism, the
actual unfamiliarity, triumphed: God, I might as well go
back to the Riviera and sleep with Janice Caricamento or
the Wilburhazy girl. To belittle all these years with some-
thing cheap and easy?
He was still excited, though, and he turned from the
veranda and went up to his room to think. Being alone
in body and spirit begets loneliness, and loneliness begets
more loneliness.
Upstairs he walked around thinking of the matter and
laying out his climbing clothes advantageously on the
faint heater; he again encountered Nicole’s telegram, still
unopened, with which diurnally she accompanied his itin-
erary. He had delayed opening it before supper—perhaps
because of the garden. It was a cablegram from Buffalo, for-
warded through Zurich.
‘Your father died peacefully tonight. HOLMES.’
He felt a sharp wince at the shock, a gathering of the
forces of resistance; then it rolled up through his loins and
stomach and throat.
He read the message again. He sat down on the bed,
breathing and staring; thinking first the old selfish child’s
thought that comes with the death of a parent, how will it
affect me now that this earliest and strongest of protections
is gone?
The atavism passed and he walked the room still, stop-

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