“All right,” he muttered, “I’ll
meet you.”
Up-stairs he found a letter waiting for him.
It was a mimeographed notice urging “the boys”
in condescendingly colloquial language to pay the
dues of the American Legion. He threw it impatiently
into the waste-basket and sat down with his elbows
on the window sill, looking down blindly into the
sunny street.
Italy—if the verdict was in their favor
it meant Italy. The word had become a sort of
talisman to him, a land where the intolerable anxieties
of life would fall away like an old garment. They
would go to the watering-places first and among the
bright and colorful crowds forget the gray appendages
of despair. Marvellously renewed, he would walk
again in the Piazza di Spanga at twilight, moving in
that drifting flotsam of dark women and ragged beggars,
of austere, barefooted friars. The thought of
Italian women stirred him faintly—when his
purse hung heavy again even romance might fly back
to perch upon it—the romance of blue canals
in Venice, of the golden green hills of Fiesole after
rain, and of women, women who changed, dissolved,
melted into other women and receded from his life,
but who were always beautiful and always young.
But it seemed to him that there should be a difference
in his attitude. All the distress that he had
ever known, the sorrow and the pain, had been because
of women. It was something that in different ways
they did to him, unconsciously, almost casually—perhaps
finding him tender-minded and afraid, they killed
the things in him that menaced their absolute sway.
Turning about from the window he faced his reflection
in the mirror, contemplating dejectedly the wan, pasty
face, the eyes with their crisscross of lines like
shreds of dried blood, the stooped and flabby figure
whose very sag was a document in lethargy. He
was thirty three—he looked forty.
Well, things would be different.
The door-bell rang abruptly and he started as though
he had been dealt a blow. Recovering himself,
he went into the hall and opened the outer dour.
It was Dot.
He retreated before her into the living room, comprehending
only a word here and there in the slow flood of sentences
that poured from her steadily, one after the other,
in a persistent monotone. She was decently and
shabbily dressed—a somehow pitiable little
hat adorned with pink and blue flowers covered and
hid her dark hair. He gathered from her words
that several days before she had seen an item in the
paper concerning the lawsuit, and had obtained his
address from the clerk of the Appellate Division.
She had called up the apartment and had been told
that Anthony was out by a woman to whom she had refused
to give her name.
In a living room he stood by the door regarding her
with a sort of stupefied horror as she rattled on....
His predominant sensation was that all the civilization
and convention around him was curiously unreal....
She was in a milliner’s shop on Sixth Avenue,
she said. It was a lonesome life. She had
been sick for a long while after he left for Camp
Mills; her mother had come down and taken her home
again to Carolina.... She had come to New York
with the idea of finding Anthony.
