Exit to Massachusetts Avenue and the College Yard, and the museum and tea with professors' wives. Think of going back to that after this life overseas. If he could love Nan, if he could take her, it would be different. That was hopeless, dead as Wenny, dead as grand opera.
"Gosh, I don't see it ... Going home after this," Baldwin had said, and they had leaned out together over the gold and rusty roofs and the domes and obelisks swaying in the great waves of honeycolored sunlight, and smelt gardens and scorched olive oil, and seen a girl with a brown throat come out of an arbor beneath them.
Suppose he didn't go ... There was time to get off the boat. One crazy thing in a lifetime.
He got to his feet, his heart dancing. I won't go.
A bell started ringing far away on another deck. That means there's five minutes. There's time. I can get another Red Cross job.
He picked up a suitcase and opened the varnished door. The companionway was full of people, officers, Red Cross men, buzz and chatter of farewells. Fanshaw slammed the door of his stateroom and pushed his suitcase back under his bunk.
Don't be a fool.
He threw himself on his back on his bunk and put his hand over his eyes. Once they got out of sight of land he'd get a good nap. Now he must go up on deck and take a last look at Palermo. A fine sight: the town piling up to Monreale, and the gardens, and behind them the cloudy dark hills of Sicily.
I've been thinking too much. I won't think of anything any more.
And I'll go back and go to and fro to lectures with a notebook under my arm, and now and then in the evening, when I haven't any engagement, walk into Boston through terrible throbbing streets and think for a moment I have Nan and Wenny with me, and that we are young, leansouled people out of the Renaissance, ready to divide life like a cake with our strong hands.