Part 1 — VI

LEWIS went home. He wanted to be alone. His dinner consisted of a cup of coffee. He went to bed and his head threw a big shadow on the ceiling.

Opening a drawer he took out a red notebook, in which he kept a register of all the women he had loved....

On and on they go, yielding, passionate, credulous, sad, too well fed or half starved. Highly strung and easily bored, Lewis jumped from adventure to adventure with the rapidity of a cinematograph, until he could hardly distinguish between the minor characters and the stars. And yet he would have been shocked at being called fickle. Women: he wanted them all the time, why, he didn't know. He wanted them to study their profiles, to load them with presents, to make them drunk, to cultivate their intelligence, to debauch them, to mould their characters, to get rid of them, to work off his irritation on them, to stay in bed for days instructing them in foreign literature, to avoid eating alone, to wake him up, to get him out of scrapes, to try to get at the truth about them, to travel with them. Particularly to travel with them. It is then that they are most attractive and in their best temper. For do not journeys begin with clothes and end with more clothes? And there is the feeling of infidelity to so many towns, so many people, so many countries. There are as many different pleasures as there are different sheets on the various beds.

Would he go to Sicily alone? It was essentially a journey to be made with a woman. Something rather capricious, a lovely little animal—"Has been in several famous collections," as they say in the auction catalogues. Exquisite hands and feet, and who would talk about herself all the time, would lose the keys of her luggage, write her name in the moisture on the windows and expect one to get out at each station to buy her "souvenirs" of the country.

No, he would go alone.

Lewis very seldom slept, just a few hours, perhaps, towards the dawn. The house was quite quiet. Outside it was raining. Three o'clock struck. Time to start work. He took from beneath his pillow "A Treatise on the Possession of the Subsoil in European Countries: Italy.... Code Napoléon, Recconi law, March 18th, 1873."

He made marginal notes and then, putting on his glasses, drafted a scheme for the development of the deposits of San Lucido.