full of letters, notes, part of a chain,
two little handkerchiefs, and some snap-shots. As he transferred them
carefully to the box his mind wandered to some place in a book where
the hero, after preserving for a year a cake of his lost love's soap,
finally washed his hands with it. He laughed and began to hum "After
you've gone" ... ceased abruptly...

The string broke twice, and then he managed to secure it, dropped
the package into the bottom of his trunk, and having slammed the lid
returned to the study.

"Going out?" Tom's voice held an undertone of anxiety.

"Uh-huh."

"Where?"

"Couldn't say, old keed."

"Let's have dinner together."

"Sorry. I told Sukey Brett I'd eat with him."

"Oh."

"By-by."

Amory crossed the street and had a high-ball; then he walked to
Washington Square and found a top seat on a bus. He disembarked at
Forty-third Street and strolled to the Biltmore bar.

"Hi, Amory!"

"What'll you have?"

"Yo-ho! Waiter!"

*****

TEMPERATURE NORMAL

The advent of prohibition with the "thirsty-first" put a sudden stop to
the submerging of Amory's sorrows, and when he awoke one morning to find
that the old bar-to-bar days were over, he had neither remorse for the
past three weeks nor regret that their repetition was impossible. He had
taken the most violent, if the weakest, method to shield himself
from the stabs of memory, and while it was not a course he would
have prescribed for others, he found in the end that it had done its
business: he was over the first flush of pain.

Don't misunderstand! Amory had loved Rosalind as he would never love
another living person. She had taken the first flush of his youth and
brought from his unplumbed depths tenderness that had surprised
him, gentleness and unselfishness that he had never given to another
creature. He had later love-affairs, but of a different sort: in those
he went back to that, perhaps, more typical frame of mind, in which the
girl became the mirror of a mood in him. Rosalind had drawn out what was
more than passionate admiration; he had a deep, undying affection for
Rosalind.

But there had been, near the end, so much dramatic tragedy, culminating
in the arabesque nightmare of his three weeks' spree, that he was
emotionally worn out. The people and surroundings that he remembered as
being cool or delicately artificial, seemed to promise him a refuge. He
wrote a cynical story which featured his father's funeral a