Thence he swung back to Italy. Then through Switzerland. Everywhere he roved through the corners that his fancy led him to; nowhere did he merely echo the footsteps of the millions of tourists. Sometimes he walked for whole days at a time. Sometimes he went to a petty inn and astonished the host by staying all day in his room and working. Whenever he found his purse suffering unduly through the vagaries of his nomadic fancies, he posted some sketches to such of the Paris or London papers as had been most clamorous for them.
It was, perhaps, just because he cared so little for it all, that this luck was come to him. In the old days he had chafed against misfortunes, against limitations of all sorts; he had declared that great successes were no longer possible, that everything worth doing had been done long ago. Now, when he cared not at all, fortune kissed him. Which also amused him.
Another man would have laid plans for the furtherment of this fame, would have counted the ways and means of plucking the fruit of success at it's ripest, would have plotted against the erasure--by caprice, of the world, or loss of his own skill, of his own name from the list of the world's favorites. Dick Lancaster did none of these things. He merely accepted the gifts of the moment, and continued recklessly in alternate disappearances and bursts of splendid achievement. There was nothing, he argued bitterly, for which he needed all the fame; so why should he care to be Fame's courtier? If fame chose to pursue him, that was another matter, and beyond his heed.
So, carelessly, recklessly eager for novelties and excitements, this young man adventured over the continent of Europe, gaining everywhere a reputation for devil-may-care-dom and bitterness.
And over many of these things he was thinking, as he sat in the garden of the "Kapuziner." He thought, too, with something of amused wistfulness of the Dick Lancaster that had once been himself,--the boy that had suffered twinges of conscience at the thought of giving up a Sunday to enjoyment, and had felt forever stained because of things that now caused him little save ennui. Was it possible that he had once been like that? Oh, yes, all things were possible; he had found that out plainly enough. Indeed, he reflected, if it should happen to him that the End came tomorrow, he would have the satisfaction of having lived his life, completely, fully, even to satisfy, in half the time that most men take for that task. Since that night, after a certain girl had told him to "forget," he had spared himself in nothing that promised entertainment. With the old restraints completely cast to the winds, with nothing but studied recklessness as his Mentor, he had followed all the promptings of that epicureanism that he now feigned to consider the only philosophy.