There she hesitated; thought a little; then added: “The thing I didn't realize was that I was pouring out all my emotional energy. I had Zanin's example always before me. He never tires. He is iron. The Jews are, I think. But--I--” she tried to smile, without great success--“Well, I'm not iron. Henry, I'm tired.”
The next morning, after Peter and Hy Lowe had gone, the Worm stood gloomily surveying his books--between two and three hundred of them, filling the case of shelves between the front wall and the fireplace, packed in on end and sidewise and heaped haphazard on top.
Half a hundred volumes in calf and nearly as many in Morocco dated from a youthful period when bindings mattered. College years were represented by a shabby row--Eschuylus, Euripides, Aristophanes, Plato, Plutarch, Virgil and Horace. He had another Horace in immaculate tree calf. There was a group of early Italians; an imposing Dante; a Boccaccio, very rare, in a dated Florentine binding; a gleaning of French history, philosophy and _belles-lettres_ from Phillippe de Comines and Villon through Rabelais, Le Sage. Racine, Corneille and the others, to Bergson, Brieux, Rolland and Anatole France--with, of course, Flaubert, de Maupassant and a tattered series of _Les Trois Mousquetaires_ in seven volumes; some modern German playwrights, Hauptmann and Schnitzler among them; Ibsen in two languages; Strindberg in English; Gogol, Tchekov, Gorky, Dostoïevski, of the Russians (in that tongue); the modern psychologists--Forel, Havelock Ellis, Freud--and the complete works of William James in assorted shapes and bindings, gathered painstakingly through the years. Walt Whitman was there, Percy's _Reliques_, much of Galsworthy, Wells and Conrad, _The Story of Gosta Berling_, John Masefield, and a number of other recent poets and novelists. All his earthly treasures were on those shelves; there, until now, had his heart been also.
He took from its shelf the rare old Boccaccio in the dated binding, tied a string around it, went down the corridor with it to the bathroom, filled the tub with cold water and tossed the book in.
It bobbed up to the surface and floated there.
He frowned--sat on the rim of the tub and watched it for ten minutes. It still floated.