Page:Meanwhile (1927).pdf/309

 Marthe and Mme. Choiseul, restlessly seeking distractions. Swimming helped to take the edge off his thoughts, and little glasses of cognac, and evening drives in the soft, cool airs that came in over the sea. He found himself in a town called Levanto and remained there partly out of weariness, partly because its isolation and miniature proportions appealed to him. The only distraction it offered was the friendliness of the inhabitants, and he played at being an Italian, with the furtive aid of a dictionary. One night, bored even with that expedient, he took out of his bag a book which he had saved from his collection at Harvard, always meaning to read it, always postponing the task, for it looked long and weighty. It was Keyserling's Travel Diary, and when he had started to read, there was no possible stopping. For a week he immersed himself in the wise, worldly subtleties of this chameleon-like intelligence, and when he was through he felt that he had passed an important landmark in his understanding of himself. For what the Baltic sage had most of all revealed to him was the fact that he, Grover Thanet, was a conservative and an aristocrat beyond redemption, for better for worse. This was both disconcerting and comforting: disconcerting because, if that were the case, how account for the creative urges he had fondly supposed himself a victim to; weren't all artists radicals? Comforting, because at least it was a definite fact about himself, and for months he had had only the moral