“After all, Anthony, it’s you who are
very romantic and young. It’s you who are
infinitely more susceptible and afraid of your calm
being broken. It’s me who tries again and
again to be moved—let myself go a thousand
times and I’m always me. Nothing—quite—stirs
me.
“Yet,” he murmured after another long
pause, “there was something about that little
girl with her absurd tan that was eternally old—like
me.”
Anthony turned over sleepily in his bed, greeting
a patch of cold sun on his counterpane, crisscrossed
with the shadows of the leaded window. The room
was full of morning. The carved chest in the corner,
the ancient and inscrutable wardrobe, stood about
the room like dark symbols of the obliviousness of
matter; only the rug was beckoning and perishable to
his perishable feet, and Bounds, horribly inappropriate
in his soft collar, was of stuff as fading as the
gauze of frozen breath he uttered. He was close
to the bed, his hand still lowered where he had been
jerking at the upper blanket, his dark-brown eyes fixed
imperturbably upon his master.
“Bows!” muttered the drowsy god.
“Thachew, Bows?”
“It’s I, sir.”
Anthony moved his head, forced his eyes wide, and
blinked triumphantly.
“Bounds.”
“Yes, sir?”
“Can you get off—yeow-ow-oh-oh-oh
God!—” Anthony yawned insufferably
and the contents of his brain seemed to fall together
in a dense hash. He made a fresh start.
“Can you come around about four and serve some
tea and sandwiches or something?”
“Yes, sir.”
Anthony considered with chilling lack of inspiration.
“Some sandwiches,” he repeated helplessly,
“oh, some cheese sandwiches and jelly ones and
chicken and olive, I guess. Never mind breakfast.”
The strain of invention was too much. He shut
his eyes wearily, let his head roll to rest inertly,
and quickly relaxed what he had regained of muscular
control. Out of a crevice of his mind crept the
vague but inevitable spectre of the night before—but
it proved in this case to be nothing but a seemingly
interminable conversation with Richard Caramel, who
had called on him at midnight; they had drunk four
bottles of beer and munched dry crusts of bread while
Anthony listened to a reading of the first part of
“The Demon Lover.”
—Came a voice now after many hours.
Anthony disregarded it, as sleep closed over him,
folded down upon him, crept up into the byways of
his mind.
Suddenly he was awake, saying: “What?”
“For how many, sir?” It was still Bounds,
standing patient and motionless at the foot of the
bed—Bounds who divided his manner among
three gentlemen.
“How many what?”
“I think, sir, I’d better know how many
are coming. I’ll have to plan for the sandwiches,
sir.”
“Two,” muttered Anthony huskily; “lady
and a gentleman.”
