"When I'm with you I feel as if there were something I could do about life. Remember the passage about 'to burn with a hard gemlike flame'?"
Wenny grunted.
"We must get something graceful and intense into it if we die in the attempt. I haven't the energy.... I'm going to talk about myself, you can't stop me, Wenny.... Mother has a curio cabinet. You know it, in the corner of the drawing room with a shepherd à la Watteau painted on the panel. Out in Nebraska when I was little I used to spend hours looking at the things: a filigree gondola from Venice, the Sistine Madonna in mosaic, carved wooden goats from Switzerland, the Nuremberg goose boy ... you know all those desperate little Mid-Victorian knick-knacks put in the cabinet so that they won't have to be dusted. I think my mind is like that. It opens. You can put things in and they stay there, but nothing moves. That's why I am so appropriate to the groves of Academe.... You're dynamic."
"A damn bundle of frustrations, that's all I am Fanshaw if you only knew. Funny how we each think the other has the inside dope on things.... My father had it about God or thought he did. He was sure of himself anyway."
"But you are sure of yourself."
"The hell I am.... Let's have a drink. I am fearfully thirsty."
"What you wanting a soda?"
Wenny laughed. They went into the candy store that was thick with the smell of fresh cooked chocolate. A boy with tow hair and a pimply face was washing glasses. Fanshaw found himself staring with a faint internal shudder at the red knuckles as his fingers moved round swiftly in glass under glass under the faucet. They drank glasses of orangeade in silence, Wenny paid the girl behind the cash-register who showed two gold teeth in a smile as they went out. Fanshaw was already thinking with eager anticipation of his room with its orange shaded lamp; the cosy bookish smell of it, the backs of his books in their case of well dusted mahogany and the discreet sheen of the gold letters of their titles in the lamplight, the sepia of the Primavera over the mantel, the neatness of his bedroom, the linen sheets on his bed, the clean aloofness of fresh pyjamas.
"I often wonder why I go out in the evenings at all."
"Why not?"