The man had had the hardest blow of his life.
He knew at last what he wanted, but in finding it
out it seemed that he had put it forever beyond his
grasp. He reached home in misery, dropped into
an armchair without even removing his overcoat, and
sat there for over an hour, his mind racing the paths
of fruitless and wretched self-absorption. She
had sent him away! That was the reiterated burden
of his despair. Instead of seizing the girl and
holding her by sheer strength until she became passive
to his desire, instead of beating down her will by
the force of his own, he had walked, defeated and
powerless, from her door, with the corners of his
mouth drooping and what force there might have been
in his grief and rage hidden behind the manner of
a whipped schoolboy. At one minute she had liked
him tremendously—ah, she had nearly loved
him. In the next he had become a thing of indifference
to her, an insolent and efficiently humiliated man.
He had no great self-reproach—some, of
course, but there were other things dominant in him
now, far more urgent. He was not so much in love
with Gloria as mad for her. Unless he could have
her near him again, kiss her, hold her close and acquiescent,
he wanted nothing more from life. By her three
minutes of utter unwavering indifference the girl had
lifted herself from a high but somehow casual position
in his mind, to be instead his complete preoccupation.
However much his wild thoughts varied between a passionate
desire for her kisses and an equally passionate craving
to hurt and mar her, the residue of his mind craved
in finer fashion to possess the triumphant soul that
had shone through those three minutes. She was
beautiful—but especially she was without
mercy. He must own that strength that could send
him away.
At present no such analysis was possible to Anthony.
His clarity of mind, all those endless resources which
he thought his irony had brought him were swept aside.
Not only for that night but for the days and weeks
that followed his books were to be but furniture and
his friends only people who lived and walked in a
nebulous outer world from which he was trying to escape—that
world was cold and full of bleak wind, and for a little
while he had seen into a warm house where fires shone.
About midnight he began to realize that he was hungry.
He went down into Fifty-second Street, where it was
so cold that he could scarcely see; the moisture froze
on his lashes and in the corners of his lips.
Everywhere dreariness had come down from the north,
settling upon the thin and cheerless street, where
black bundled figures blacker still against the night,
moved stumbling along the sidewalk through the shrieking
wind, sliding their feet cautiously ahead as though
they were on skis. Anthony turned over toward
Sixth Avenue, so absorbed in his thoughts as not to
notice that several passers-by had stared at him.
His overcoat was wide open, and the wind was biting
in, hard and full of merciless death.
