Page:The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).djvu/59

 neither of which seemed to matter greatly. He listened to the sugary Italian music played abominably by a band seated under the arcade. "The Italians," he thought bitterly, "are a musical people." He listened to fragments of talk and fanned himself because of the heat. Yet he enjoyed himself as he had not done in years. He felt life stirring about him. He fell again to speculating upon the mystery of such lives as Father d'Astier's and the d'Orobelli's, which seemed so obvious and were in reality so mysterious. He thought of that preposterous woman Mrs. Weatherby and found himself wondering what it would be like to love and be loved, to have a home and wife and perhaps children. He could not see why these things had never occurred to him before and he thought himself a little mad. Perhaps it was the heat and the hot wind, and perhaps it was the queer change which had come over him lately. Indeed, he even blushed a little in the darkness. He thought a great deal about Miss Fosdick.

At last when he had finished dinner he went for a walk in the moonlight along the river. The wind had died down and it occurred to him suddenly that in the moonlight Brinoë seemed as romantic as people supposed it to be. In the moonlight even the terrible equestrian statue of Victor Emmanuel seemed romantic.

As he walked, his own past began to concern him more and more as a sterile thing which had meant nothing to the world and very little to himself, a past filled with promise that had always seemed foredoomed to disappointment. At twenty-four he