his life he rather
longed for death to roll over his generation, obliterating their petty
fevers and struggles and exultations. His youth seemed never so vanished
as now in the contrast between the utter loneliness of this visit and
that riotous, joyful party of four years before. Things that had been
the merest commonplaces of his life then, deep sleep, the sense of
beauty around him, all desire, had flown away and the gaps they left
were filled only with the great listlessness of his disillusion.

"To hold a man a woman has to appeal to the worst in him." This sentence
was the thesis of most of his bad nights, of which he felt this was to
be one. His mind had already started to play variations on the subject.
Tireless passion, fierce jealousy, longing to possess and crush--these
alone were left of all his love for Rosalind; these remained to him as
payment for the loss of his youth--bitter calomel under the thin sugar
of love's exaltation.

In his room he undressed and wrapping himself in blankets to keep out
the chill October air drowsed in an armchair by the open window.

He remembered a poem he had read months before:

"Oh staunch old heart who toiled so long for me,
I waste my years sailing along the sea--"

Yet he had no sense of waste, no sense of the present hope that waste
implied. He felt that life had rejected him.

"Rosalind! Rosalind!" He poured the words softly into the half-darkness
until she seemed to permeate the room; the wet salt breeze filled
his hair with moisture, the rim of a moon seared the sky and made the
curtains dim and ghostly. He fell asleep.

When he awoke it was very late and quiet. The blanket had slipped partly
off his shoulders and he touched his skin to find it damp and cold.

Then he became aware of a tense whispering not ten feet away.

He became rigid.

"Don't make a sound!" It was Alec's voice. "Jill--do you hear me?"

"Yes--" breathed very low, very frightened. They were in the bathroom.

Then his ears caught a louder sound from somewhere along the corridor
outside. It was a mumbling of men's voices and a repeated muffled
rapping. Amory threw off the blankets and moved close to the bathroom
door.

"My God!" came the girl's voice again. "You'll have to let them in."

"Sh!"

Suddenly a steady, insistent knocking began at Amory's hall door
and simultaneously out of the bathroom came Alec, followed by the
vermilion-lipped girl. They were both clad in pajam