nd literally _warm themselves_ at the calories of virtue he
gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and the faces simper in
delight--"How _innocent_ the poor child is!" They're warming themselves
at her virtue. But Sarah sees the simper and never makes that remark
again. Only she feels a little colder after that.

Q.--All your calories gone?

A.--All of them. I'm beginning to warm myself at other people's virtue.

Q.--Are you corrupt?

A.--I think so. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about good and evil at all
any more.

Q.--Is that a bad sign in itself?

A.--Not necessarily.

Q.--What would be the test of corruption?

A.--Becoming really insincere--calling myself "not such a bad fellow,"
thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of
losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists
think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they
ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over
again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood--she wants to
repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the
pleasure of losing it again.

Q.--Where are you drifting?

This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind's most familiar state--a
grotesque blending of desires, worries, exterior impressions and
physical reactions.

One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street--or One Hundred and Thirty-seventh
Street.... Two and three look alike--no, not much. Seat damp... are
clothes absorbing wetness from seat, or seat absorbing dryness from
clothes?... Sitting on wet substance gave appendicitis, so Froggy
Parker's mother said. Well, he'd had it--I'll sue the steamboat company,
Beatrice said, and my uncle has a quarter interest--did Beatrice go to
heaven?... probably not--He represented Beatrice's immortality, also
love-affairs of numerous dead men who surely had never thought of
him... if it wasn't appendicitis, influenza maybe. What? One Hundred
and Twentieth Street? That must have been One Hundred and Twelfth back
there. One O Two instead of One Two Seven. Rosalind not like Beatrice,
Eleanor like Beatrice, only wilder and brainier. Apartments along here
expensive--probably hundred and fifty a month--maybe two hundred. Uncle
had only paid hundred a month for whole great big house in Minneapolis.
Question--were the stairs on the left or right as you came in? Anyway,
in 12 Univee they were straight back and to the left. What