he became a little older, and then he
would be all right. Anyhow he appeared to love her now; and that was
something. Because he was lonely, fearsome, uncertain of himself,
uncertain of the future, he welcomed these unsparing attentions on her
part, and this deceived her. Who else would give them to him, he
thought; who else would be so faithful in times like these? He almost
came to believe that he could love her again, be faithful to her, if he
could keep out of the range of these other enticing personalities. If
only he could stamp out this eager desire for other women, their praise
and their beauty!

But this was more because he was sick and lonely than anything else. If
he had been restored to health then and there, if prosperity had
descended on him as he so eagerly dreamed, it would have been the same
as ever. He was as subtle as nature itself; as changeable as a
chameleon. But two things were significant and real--two things to which
he was as true and unvarying as the needle to the pole--his love of the
beauty of life which was coupled with his desire to express it in color,
and his love of beauty in the form of the face of a woman, or rather
that of a girl of eighteen. That blossoming of life in womanhood at
eighteen!--there was no other thing under the sun like it to him. It was
like the budding of the trees in spring; the blossoming of flowers in
the early morning; the odor of roses and dew, the color of bright waters
and clear jewels. He could not be faithless to that. He could not get
away from it. It haunted him like a joyous vision, and the fact that the
charms of Stella and Ruby and Angela and Christina and Frieda in whom it
had been partially or wholly shadowed forth at one time or another had
come and gone, made little difference. It remained clear and demanding.
He could not escape it--the thought; he could not deny it. He was
haunted by this, day after day, and hour after hour; and when he said to
himself that he was a fool, and that it would lure him as a
will-o'-the-wisp to his destruction and that he could find no profit in
it ultimately, still it would not down. The beauty of youth; the beauty
of eighteen! To him life without it was a joke, a shabby scramble, a
work-horse job, with only silly material details like furniture and
houses and steel cars and stores all involved in a struggle for what? To
make a habitation for more shabby humanity? Never! To make a habitation
for beauty? Certainly! W