Stacey fled to Philadelphia, thence to Baltimore, then up to Boston. He went to dinners and dances and dinner-dances in one place and another. Débutantes a little nakeder and bolder than he remembered them in past years. Quite in keeping with everything else. The whole country singing one vast jazz song of praise to the body, sole preoccupation how to gratify every instinct it possessed. It was callousness carried further than was credible, since across the ocean were thousands who, too, were thinking only about their bodies—perforce, being unable to get sufficient food and clothes to keep them alive.
He gazed at it all with bitter aloofness. What could he do about it? What could any one do about a world like this? There was a desolate emptiness in his heart that inhibited even rage. He longed for annihilation, the absolute eternal extinction of self. He had certainly altered in these last months. Even he, who tried not to think of himself, could not help perceiving this. His reactions were more jerky, disconnected with any former reactions, incoherent. He was not a strong scornful soul, detached and looking at everything in one manner; he was a series of sterile unrelated emotions, with the only continuous theme that ran through them all, disgust.
He gave it up at last and returned to Vernon—why, he could not have explained. He wrote no one that he was coming.
It was a morning in early December when he got back. Snow was thick on the city. The taxi that Stacey hired splashed through slush in the centre of town and slewed madly, despite its chains, on the boulevard leading to the Carroll house.
Stacey flung himself on the couch in his study and presently fell asleep. He did not wake until Parker knocked at the door to call him to luncheon. Two hours of unconsciousness. Well, that was so much gained, anyway.
He spent as many hours of the afternoon as he could in bathing and dressing, then at last left the house and tramped away through the snow. He had no objective in mind, but after a while, finding himself near Philip Blair’s house, went up the steps to it and rang the bell.
Catherine opened the door. At first he thought that she looked wan and tired; but she smiled with pleasure at sight of him, and the impression vanished.
“I’m awfully glad you’re back, Stacey,” she said. “Phil was saying last night that it seemed years you’d been away. Come in. Marian—Mrs. Price—is here.”
He felt the faintest touch of surprise,—no more, for he was almost done with correlating facts. His mind no longer worked that way. He was rapidly growing unable to see people in relation to one another, and so to find one relation natural, another curious. Unity was beginning to desert his impressions. Each of them seemed to come separately.
Thus he was scarcely at all surprised when, at sight of Marian, whom he had nearly forgotten, his old passion for her leaped up like sudden flame. He shook her hand, with a word or two of casual greeting, but his eyes met hers electrically. He made no effort to combat the sensation. If anything, he was grateful for it. And the antagonism, as strong as the attraction, that formerly she had aroused in him, was absent, since he was living in the isolated moment.