to get it over as quickly as he could because of its distasteful reminder of a harsh reality he wanted to forget. He not only lacked by nature the sense of money, he was also at the blissful period in a young man’s life when one hundred dollars is as good as a million. In fact, with twenty dollars in bright, flimsy fifty-franc notes in his pocket, the pleasant terrace of a good café, a drink, the knowledge of delicious food and wine within, and the slow, sensual meditations of desire, he felt as rich as any millionaire on earth. At such a time, the whole earth lay before him in winding vistas of pleasure, joy, and mystery: in the huge unreason of this enchantment he was sure that there was nothing ahead of him but a beautiful and fortunate life, filled with success and happiness, and if by any chance he thought of money, it was only to dismiss the thought impatiently with the irrational conviction that it would always be ready when he needed it, that it would come to him miraculously and wonderfully like manna out of heaven, that he could get great sums of money, in many strange, delightful ways, at any time he wanted it.
Now the Countess, by the harsh worldliness of her insistence, had jarred him back to a disquieting reality for which he had no relish. While the old woman followed every movement with greedy, avaricious eyes glued on the cheques, he thumbed them over quickly and sullenly, told her curtly their amount, and thrust the book brusquely back into his pocket.
When he had finished, she shook her head at him with sad reproach.
“Ah!” she said, “what extravagance! A French family could have lived comfortably for a month on what you have spent here in the last week.”
He winced and stirred restlessly, pierced suddenly with a nameless sense of guilt and shame, and personal unworthiness, a sudden evocation of the infinite toil and minute saving of his mother’s life. And he felt this despite the fact that his mother had now acquired a considerable estate, a large sum of money, and, in spite of her parsimonious economies in innumerable small ways, displayed in her real estate investments a riotous extravagance that far surpassed any of his own on the sensual pleasures of food and drink and books, on voyages and women. And this curious and irrational sense of guilt and shame was, he knew, not peculiar to himself, but rooted somehow in the structure of the lives of most of the Americans he had known. It was something that went back almost past time and memory, that they had always had, that was distilled
