... These times were to begin
"when we get our money"; it was on such dreams rather than on any
satisfaction with their increasingly irregular, increasingly dissipated
life that their hope rested. On gray mornings when the jests of the
night before had shrunk to ribaldries without wit or dignity, they
could, after a fashion, bring out this batch of common hopes and count
them over, then smile at each other and repeat, by way of clinching the
matter, the terse yet sincere Nietzscheanism of Gloria's defiant "I
don't care!"
Things had been slipping perceptibly. There was the money question,
increasingly annoying, increasingly ominous; there was the realization
that liquor had become a practical necessity to their amusement--not an
uncommon phenomenon in the British aristocracy of a hundred years ago,
but a somewhat alarming one in a civilization steadily becoming more
temperate and more circumspect. Moreover, both of them seemed vaguely
weaker in fibre, not so much in what they did as in their subtle
reactions to the civilization about them. In Gloria had been born
something that she had hitherto never needed--the skeleton, incomplete
but nevertheless unmistakable, of her ancient abhorrence, a conscience.
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