The tiny thread of smoke from his cigarette rose beside the column of smoke from the fire, like a sturdily independent spirit. His thoughts, too, were aloof, detached from the insistent current of other people’s thoughts.
He had received a substantial rise in salary that morning.
“Now you ought to think about getting married,” his sister had said, not for the first time.
He was thinking about it, but in a way that would have dismayed her. She was always introducing him to “nice girls,” and growing a little annoyed with him because of his indifference.
“I don’t see what fault you can find with her!” she would say, as if one of the “nice girls” was as good as another; and, in her heart, that was what she did think. She wanted only to see Kirby married and in a home of his own.
He kept his own counsel, for it was no use trying to tell his sister. Let her go on trying to snare him, to capture him, to bind him tight to the life that he so utterly rejected! He had seen it happen to other fellows he knew. He had watched them fall in love, get married, and set up homes of their own, and had seen them grow harassed, preoccupied, sometimes bitter. There was his brother-in-law, for instance, complaining about the bills, talking of giving up his club, guilty and apologetic if he came in late. It was supposed to be comic, all this sort of thing, but Kirby did not see it so.
“If there’s nothing better than that—” he thought.
When he was younger he had been sure that there was something better. In books, in operas, in plays, he had caught the echo of a sublime thing, and he had believed that it was every man’s birthright—a love passionate and honest and beyond measure generous. He had meant to wait for it; but, as he grew older, his faith died.
He did not see any such thing in actual life. He saw, instead, love that began beautifully and honestly, but ended in a suburban home and a thousand ignoble worries; and he would have none of that. If there was nothing better, then he would do without. He was doing well in business, and he would keep on doing better and better, and that would have to be enough.
He threw away his cigarette, clasped his hands under his head, and lay looking at the stars. Here on this beach, as a boy, he had played intensely serious games of Indians and pirates, always with a fire like this. Even now he could recapture something of the old thrill of wonder and expectancy, the feeling he had had that marvelous things were surely going to happen.