Page 358 - tender-is-the-night

subject.
‘It’s a hole-and-corner business at best,’ Dick told him.
‘You’ll spend your life on it, and its consequences, and you
won’t have time or energy for any other decent or social act.
If you want to face the world you’ll have to begin by con-
trolling your sensuality— and, first of all, the drinking that
provokes it—‘
He talked automatically, having abandoned the case ten
minutes before. They talked pleasantly through another
hour about the boy’s home in Chili and about his ambitions.
It was as close as Dick had ever come to comprehending
such a character from any but the pathological angle—he
gathered that this very charm made it possible for Francisco
to perpetrate his outrages, and, for Dick, charm always had
an independent existence, whether it was the mad gallantry
of the wretch who had died in the clinic this morning, or
the courageous grace which this lost young man brought
to a drab old story. Dick tried to dissect it into pieces small
enough to store away—realizing that the totality of a life may
be different in quality from its segments, and also that life
during the forties seemed capable of being observed only in
segments. His love for Nicole and Rosemary, his friendship
with Abe North, with Tommy Barban in the broken uni-
verse of the war’s ending—in such contacts the personalities
had seemed to press up so close to him that he became the
personality itself—there seemed some necessity of taking
all or nothing; it was as if for the remainder of his life he
was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain peo-
ple, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as

358 Tender is the Night