plans
are characteristically indefinite. She knows heaps
of people all over, of course. I'll write often.
Please tell Hadow and Mr. Sampson I'm a physical
wreck--or mental, if it sounds more convincing.
I'm neither; but I'm tired--tired--_tired_.

"If you can possibly help Phil and Jimmy to
understand----

"Here's Mona now. Good-by, dear.

"Your ashamed, utterly grateful

"SUSAN.

"P. S. I'm wearing your furs."

THE SIXTH CHAPTER

I

SO Togo and I went home. My misery craving company, I rode with him all
the way up in the baggage-car, on the self-deceptive theory that he
needed an everpresent friend. It is true, however, that he did; and it
gratified me and a little cheered me that he seemed really to appreciate
my attentions. I sat on a trunk, lighting each cigarette from the end of
the last, and he sat at my feet, leaned wearily against the calf of my
right leg and permitted me to fondle his ears....

II

"Spring, the sweet spring!" Then birds do sing, hey-ding-a-ding--and so
on.... Sweet lovers love the spring.... Jimmy, Phil and I saw little of
each other those days. Jimmy clouded his sunny brow and started in
working overtime. Phil plunged headlong into what was to have proved his
philosophical _magnum opus_--"The Pluralistic Fallacy; a Critical Study
of Pragmatism." I also plunged headlong into a series of interpretative
essays for Heywood Sampson's forthcoming review. My first essay was to
be on Tolstoy; my second, on Nietzsche; my third, on Anatole France; my
fourth, on Samuel Butler and Bernard Shaw; my fifth, on Thomas Hardy;
and my sixth and last, on Walt Whitman. From the works of these writers
it was my purpose to illustrate and clarify for the semicultured the
more significant intellectual and spiritual tendencies of our
enlightened and humane civilization. It is characteristic that I
supposed myself well equipped for this task. But I never got beyond my
detached, urbane appreciation of Nietzsche; just as I had concluded
it--our enlightened and humane civilization suddenly blew to atoms with
a _cliche_-shattering report and a vile stench as of too-long-imprisoned
gas....

III

During those first months of Susan's absence, which for more than four
years were to prove the last months of almost world-wide and wholly
world-deceptive peace,