He dreaded the moment when the
backbone of the day should be broken, when he should have met the girl
at last, talked to her, and then bowed her laughter out the door,
returning only to the melancholy dregs in the teacups and the gathering
staleness of the uneaten sandwiches.
There was a growing lack of color in Anthony's days. He felt it
constantly and sometimes traced it to a talk he had had with Maury Noble
a month before. That anything so ingenuous, so priggish, as a sense of
waste should oppress him was absurd, but there was no denying the fact
that some unwelcome survival of a fetish had drawn him three weeks
before down to the public library, where, by the token of Richard
Caramel's card, he had drawn out half a dozen books on the Italian
Renaissance. That these books were still piled on his desk in the
original order of carriage, that they were daily increasing his
liabilities by twelve cents, was no mitigation of their testimony. They
were cloth and morocco witnesses to the fact of his defection. Anthony
had had several hours of acute and startling panic.
In justification of his manner of living there was first, of course, The
Meaninglessness of Life.
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