Page:Stringer - Wine of Life.djvu/297



TORROW, after a night of troubled thought, knew that he would have to go back to Torrie. He was reluctant to acknowledge it, even to himself. Yet he began to realize that it would be useless to combat further those combined currents of impulse and obliga- tion carrying him back to the older order of things. He was the prey of feelings too powerful for his own will. And he was tired of passivity, tired, too, of the tedium of suspended action.

But he stood, as yet, convinced of nothing, of nothing, at least, beyond the knowledge that the present situation had become unendurable. He could not stay on with Angelo. That was out of the question. And he could not go back to the old order without beholding there vast and calamitous changes. There was, in fact, no such thing as the old order. Yet he must go back to what was left of it. It would be still another compromise imposed upon him by life. But it was a compromise for the sake of survival and to survive was still a final and sullen instinct with him. The trampled spark, he told himself, must not go entirely out. . ..

It was not until his taxi-cab swung from Lexington Avenue into Twenty-Fourth Street that he thought primarily of Torrie and her predicament. That brought to him a less ponderable sense of disturbance, an inde- terminate feeling of guilt touched with pity, a shadowy consciousness of incompetence shot through with the twi- light hope of vague renewals, a hunger to make amends and reconstruct what was threatening to fall into ruins. There was the need now for some newer outlook. Fate had reached out its iron hand and linked him up with 287