A great moral laziness had seized Lucio Sabini on that second portion of the day. Two or three telephone calls had invited him to go in gay and amiable society to two or three different places, and two or three easy excuses had served him to decline the invitations—the Roseg glacier, a boating party on the Lake of the Maloja, a visit to Friedrich Nietzsche's house at Sils Maria. All were excuses to meet once more, after a hundred times, people already known; to talk on the way, without ever looking where they were passing, of the incidental things of the day before, and of the days before that, and then to finish, not before the colossal wall of a glacier, not in a poetical crossing of a lonely lake amidst the lofty black mountains, not before a little garden of rose bushes, geraniums, and yellow marguerites, that the eyes of the poet of Zarathustra had seen born and perish, from May to September, at Sils Maria, but at tea-tables laden with toast, cakes and pastry and plates of confectionery at the restaurants half-way between the glaciers, in the smart latterie, in the halls of large hotels, and vestibules of small hotels. "Glaciers, lakes, hills, large tracts, villages," thought Lucio Sabini, in a bad temper; "all little excuses to wrap up in a large veil and drive in a carriage, speaking ill of worthy people and beautiful things—and to take tea!"
However, to conquer his attack of misanthropy, after lunch he went for a stroll along the road, to excuse himself again to those whose invitation he had refused, to greet some more sympathetic and elect acquaintance, and to watch some unknown faces passing, those solitary faces that attracted him powerfully. What a lot of people he had seen thus, climbing, descending, and stopping half-way, and setting out again in the early hours of the afternoon, as he quietly came and went to the "Palace" and the "Badruth," stopping and chatting with everyone, foregathering with some friend just about to leave, commenting with irony and sometimes with bitterness on certain bizarre, clamorous and scandalous events. But still all this giddy worldliness had not excited him. Gradually he saw everyone he knew and did not know pass up and down; then a dominant thought, at first vague and uncertain, afterwards more insistent, mastered him. At noon, on entering his hotel, at the porter's box, he had read a notice in German that the day before a lady's silver purse had been lost in the gardens near the tennis-court, and it was requested that the purse should be returned for a reward to the porter of the Hôtel Kulm.
"An hotel for American and English women," he thought at once. "This Lilian will be a governess of fifty, with a maroon veil to her hat. She will give me a dollar for a reward in exchange for her purse." And he laughed at his little romance.
Moreover, when, through a singular and inexplicable motive of fastidiousness, he had refused all the invitations that would have carried him far-away from the Hôtel Kulm, and had seen the great crowd set off gradually, excited by another experience and the life in the open air, but seated in carriages beneath rugs and veils; when he found himself alone, he was again conquered by the desire of finding and knowing her who had lost the silver purse. He thought himself sometimes puerile and sometimes downright grotesque. But he believed in opportunity; so a little later he watched the simpler, modest, and unknown people set off on foot through the Alpine paths to the Meierei, to Waldschlossli, to Oberalpina or Unteralpina, all those who were fond of walking or could not afford to spend money on carriages, and he saw them disappear along the roads and lanes, beneath the trees, or across the tall grass. Towards four o'clock he observed that the broad roads and paths were becoming almost deserted, and silence and peace to be enveloping St. Moritz Bad and St. Moritz Dorf. Then it was that slowly he took the path that leads from the central place of the Dorf, where the tram stops, to the Engadine "Kulm."
He thought: "Probably this Lilian is very ugly; but surely she has a beautiful soul. What does it matter? I shall be very polite to her for some minutes."
On arriving at the big door of the "Kulm" he entered slowly, to make inquiries from the porter, as if it were of no consequence.
"The person who has lost the silver purse," replied the porter at once, "is Miss Temple."
"Ah," said Lucio, "and is Miss Temple in the hotel?"
"No, she has gone out for a walk. You can leave the purse with me."
"No; I would rather return. Do you know where Miss Temple has gone?"