“Sit down. You must sit down.”
She put her languid and imperative hand on his wrist, and he sat down. He took her hand and put it against his forehead for a moment. But that was no use. For her hand seemed to add fever to his fever.
“I have seen you standing amongst graves in the shadow of cypress trees,” he said. “In England I saw you like that. But—how did you know?”
“Drink your tea. Don’t hurry. We’ve got such a long time.”
“I have. I have all the days and nights—every hour of them—at my own disposal. I’m the freest man on earth, I suppose. No work, no ties.”
“You’ve given up everything?”
“Oh, of course. That is, the things that were still left to me to give up. They didn’t mean much.”
“Eat something,” she said, in a casual voice, pushing a plate of delicious little cakes towards him.
“Thank you.”
He took one and ate. He regained self-control, but he knew that at any moment, if anything unusual happened, or if he dared to think, or to talk, seriously about the horror of his life, he would probably go down with a crash into an abyss in which all of his manhood, every scrap of his personal dignity, would be utterly lost. And still almost blindly he held on to certain things in the blackness which encompassed him. He still wished to play the man, and though in bitterness he had tried sometimes to sink down in degradation, his body—or so it had seemed to him—had resisted the will of the injured soul, which had said to it, “Go down into the dirt; seek satisfaction there. Your sanity and your purity of life have availed you nothing. From them you have had no reward. Then seek the rewards of the other life. Thousands of men enjoy them. Join that crowd, and put all the anemic absurdities of so-called goodness behind you.”