Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/58

 Leonardo? They were growing old, too, like himself, and the d'Orobelli was frightened.

Suddenly, as if awakening, he turned toward the old palace where he occupied two shabby rooms. Something odd had happened to him and he was aware of it all at once with a sudden quickening of the heart. He had gone up the hill feeling a bitter and disappointed man, old at fifty and lost forever, and now he felt suddenly no age at all. It was as if age did not exist. Even the boredom had vanished—that awful boredom in which nothing interested him, in which everything lost its value and slithered to a common level of monotony. There were two things he wanted passionately. One was to escape somehow from Brinoë and the other to live a little before he died. It was becoming an obsession with him. It seemed that until now he had existed in a kind of literary spell completely detached from reality, and now when he had begun to be old he was aware of life.

He felt a disturbing desire to wander off alone in search of adventure, moving in the constant romantic expectancy that something might happen to him. He had no idea what it was he expected nor what he would do with it when it arrived, but it seemed to him that he could not go back to his flat to unlock the door and find the same chairs, the same books, even the same food that he had known day after day in years of endless monotony. He halted and turned abruptly, setting out for the Piazza Garibaldi, where there were lights and music and gaiety.

He had a poor dinner and some vinegary wine,