the young men, thinking with desperate sick pain of his own bunched and crooked ones. He stood naked before a mirror, looking at his long gaunt body, smooth and white save for the crooked toes and the terrible spot on his neck—lean, but moulded with delicate and powerful symmetry.
Then, slowly, he began to take a terrible joy in his taint. The thing on his neck that could not be gouged or burnt away he identified with a tragic humor of his blood that plunged him downward at times into melancholia and madness. But there was, he saw, a great health in him as well, that could bring him back victoriously from desolation. In his reading of fiction, in the movies, in the collar advertisements, in all his thousand fantasies of Bruce-Eugene, he had never known a hero with crooked toes, a decaying tooth, and a patch of tetter on his neck. Nor had he ever known a heroine, whether among the society women of Chambers and Phillips, or among the great elegants of Meredith and Ouida, who had borne such a blemish. But, in all his fantasies now, he loved a woman with hair of carrot silk and eyes of a faintly weary violet, webbed delicately at the corners. Her teeth were small, white and irregular, and she had one molar edged with gold which was visible when she smiled. She was subtle, and a little weary: a child and a mother, as old and as deep as Asia, and as young as germinal April who returns forever like a girl, a mistress, a parent, and a nurse.
Thus, through the death of his brother, and the sickness that was rooted in his own flesh, Eugene came to know a deeper and darker wisdom than he had ever known before. He began to see that what was subtle and beautiful in human life was touched with a divine pearl-sickness. Health was to be found in the steady stare of the cats and dogs, or in the smooth vacant chops of the peasant. But he looked on the faces of the lords of the earth—and he saw them wasted and devoured by the beautiful disease of thought and passion. In the pages of a thousand books he saw their portraits: Coleridge at twenty-five, with the loose sensual mouth, gaping idiotically, the vast staring eyes, holding in their opium depths the vision of seas haunted by the albatross, the great white forehead—head mixed of Zeus and the village degenerate; the lean worn head of Caesar, a little thirsty in the flanks;
