He
searched in vain for any reason why she should have taken this
attitude in the matter of a simple kiss.
Therefore when he was cut in on by the man with the mustache he went
out into the hall and, making up a sentence, said it over to himself
several times. Considerably deleted, this was it:
"Well, if any girl ever led a man on and then jolted him, she did--and
she has no kick coming if I go out and get beautifully boiled."
So he walked through the supper room into a small room adjoining it,
which he had located earlier in the evening. It was a room in which
there were several large bowls of punch flanked by many bottles. He
took a seat beside the table which held the bottles.
At the second highball, boredom, disgust, the monotony of time, the
turbidity of events, sank into a vague background before which
glittering cobwebs formed. Things became reconciled to themselves,
things lay quietly on their shelves; the troubles of the day arranged
themselves in trim formation and at his curt wish of dismissal,
marched off and disappeared. And with the departure of worry came
brilliant, permeating symbolism. Edith became a flighty, negligible
girl, not to be worried over; rather to be laughed at. She fitted like
a figure of his own dream into the surface world forming about him. He
himself became in a measure symbolic, a type of the continent
bacchanal, the brilliant dreamer at play.
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