There is a trick the fancy has. Start it in any direction and it goes prancing off at a great rate and that trick my own fancy now did.
Although my body ached as a result of my recent plunge into the field of action I, in fancy, plunged in again and began thinking of myself as holding the handle of a plow and plowing the fields of life, turning great furrows, planting perhaps the seeds of new ideas. Oho, for the smell of new-turned earth, the sight of the sower casting his seed!
I was off again. On that day Nora had done the work in my room early but now she was sweeping and dusting on the floor below and I could hear her moving about.
Why should I not first of all conquer Nora? That, I at that moment thought, was surely the beginning of manhood, to conquer some woman, and why not Nora as well as another? It would be something of an undertaking that was sure. Nora was not beautiful nor perhaps too subtle in her outlook on life but then was I myself subtle? She was direct and simple and had, I thought, a direct and simple mind and after I had conquered her, had bent her to my own will, what might we not do together? There was to be sure the sailor with whom she was to live and to whom she was promised but I brushed him aside. “I can cook his goose in some way,” I thought to myself, much as I had thought I could easily dispose of the ball player by my feints and crosses.
We might, I thought, following up the fancy I had just had, begin by being tillers of the soil. We could go West somewhere and take up land. Already I had read many tales of the West and had a fancy for casting in my fortunes with the West. “Out where the smile lasts a little longer, out where the handclasp is a little stronger,” etc. “Oho, for the land where men are men and gals are gals!” I thought my fancy running away like a wild horse broken out of its stall. I saw myself owning vast farms somewhere in the Far West and saw, I am afraid, Nora doing most of the plowing, planting and the harvesting of crops, the while I rode grandly over the estate on a black stallion, receiving the homage of serfs.
But what would I do with my odd moments? I had tried talking to Nora of the things that interested me most, the play of light over a factory chimney, seen amid smoke as darkness came on, odd expressions caught from the lips of passing men and women, the play of the fancy over the imagined lives of men and women too. Had Nora understood or cared? Could I go on always talking and talking in the face of the fact that I knew she was not much interested?
With a rush of resolution I threw my doubts aside. Oh, to be one who made two blades of grass where but one had grown before! With Nora at my side I would in some field become great and powerful. I was at the moment but a bunged-up fellow lying on the bed in a cheap rooming house but what did that matter? All about me was the great American world rushing on and on to new mechanical and material triumphs. Teddy Roosevelt and the strenuous life had not yet come but he was implicit in the American mood. Imperialism had already come. It was time, I told myself, to be up and doing.
Behind him lay the gray Azores,
Behind the Gates of Hercules;
Before him not the ghost of shores;