It will be an absorbing occupation.
It will divert the current of her thoughts from the sentimentality that I deprecate, and provided she does not serve up hard-boiled facts to me at dinner, she will be the pleasanter companion.
The only return to it was when I kissed her at parting.
"That is the first, Marcus, for twelve hours," she said; very sweetly, it is true--but still reproachfully.
But Sacred Name of a Little Good Man! (as the depraved French people say), what is the use of this continuous osculation between rational beings of opposite sexes who set out to enjoy themselves?
If only St.
Paul, in the famous passage when he says there is a time for this and a time for that, had mentioned kissing, he would have done a great deal of practical good.
July 13th.
To-night, for the first time since I came into the family estates (such as they are), I feel the paralysis of aspiration occasioned by poverty.
If I were very rich, I would buy the two next houses, pull them down and erect on the site a tower forty foot high.

At the very top would be one comfortable room to be reached by a lift, and in this room I could have my being, while it listed me, and be secure from all kinds of incursions and interruptions.

Antoinette's one-eyed cat could not scratch for admittance; Antoinette herself could not enter under pretext of domestic economics and lure me into profitless gossip; and I could defy Carlotta, who is growing to be as pervasive as the smell of pickles over Crosse & Blackwell's factory.

She comes in without knocking, looks at picture-books, sprawls about doing nothing, smokes my best cigarettes, hums tunes which she has picked up from barrel-organs, bends over me to see what I am writing, munching her eternal sweetmeats in my ear, and laughs at me when I tell her she has irremediably broken the thread of my ideas.

Of course I might be brutal and turn her out.