Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/316

 sister of Victor d'Orobelli was playing Chopin quietly in the far corner. He noticed that she had the same fine red hair and clear skin that Victor had. She was young and very beautiful, and in his weariness and confusion it seemed to him for a moment that she might have been his own daughter if he had chosen differently. He had only Fulco.

That night when he was alone again in his room over the Georgian doorway that faced the park he closed and locked his door and then sat down before the fire they had made for him, because he sometimes had chills at night, even in July. All through the interminable evening he had been thinking in the back of his mind, behind all the talk and chatter and the music made by the Burnham girl, of Fulco, and he made the astounding discovery that Fulco hadn't any longer the power of irritating him. He had begun to think of Fulco as Poor Fulco in the way he thought of Anna as Poor Anna. That meant, he knew, that he was really an old man and at the end of things. He saw that he alone was responsible for Fulco's very existence and that he had in a way always shirked that responsibility. He saw poor Fulco in his checked suit and umbrella wandering from village to village in Italy, trying to "purify Christianity," and trying to free it of all the centuries of tiresome accumulations and growths. Fulco who hadn't the power or the dignity or the presence to convince anyone of anything. Fulco attempting a new Reformation. . ..

He turned away from the fire and began to undress. His hands trembled a little, like those of a very old man. They had never trembled before.