I won’t pity him, he thought, so it is not disloyal. I have been in enough trouble myself so that it is not disloyal to think about Roger’s trouble. My own is different because I only really loved one woman and then lost her. I know well enough why. But I am through with thinking about that and it would probably be well not to think about Roger either. But tonight, because of the moonlight which, as always, would not let him sleep, he thought about him and his serious and comic troubles.
He thought about the last girl Roger had been in love with in Paris when they had both lived there and how very handsome and how very false he thought she was when Roger had brought her to the studio. For Roger there was nothing false about her. She was another of his illusions and all his great talent for being faithful was at her service until they were both free to marry. Then, in a month, everything that had always been clear about her to everyone who knew her well was suddenly clear to Roger. It must have been a difficult day when it first happened but the process of seeing her clearly had been going on for some time when Roger had come up to the studio. He had looked at the canvases for a while and spoken critically and very intelligently about them. Then he said, “I told that Ayers I wouldn’t marry her.”
“Good,” Thomas Hudson had said. “Was it a surprise?”
“Not too much. There’d been some talk about it. She’s a phony.”
“No,” Thomas Hudson had said. “How?”
“Right through. Any way you slice her.”
“I thought you liked her.”
“No. I tried to like her. But I couldn’t make it except at the start. I was in love with her.”
“What’s in love?”
“You ought to know.”
“Yes,” Thomas Hudson had said. “I ought to know.”
“Didn’t you like her?”
“No. I couldn’t stand her.”
“She was your girl. And you didn’t ask me.”
“I told her. But now I have to make it stick.”
“You better pull out.”
“No,” he said. “Let her pull out.”
“I only thought it might be simpler.”
“This is my town as much as it is hers.”
“I know,” Thomas Hudson had said.
“You fought that one out, too, didn’t you?” Roger had asked.
“Yes. You can’t win on any of them. But you can fight them out. Why don’t you just move your
“I’m all right where I am,” Roger had said.
“I remember the formula.
“It starts with
“But isn’t it going to be hard on you seeing her?”
“No. It’s going to cure me. That and hearing her talk.”
“What about her?”
“She can figure that out for herself. She’s figured plenty out in the last four years.”
“Five,” Thomas Hudson had said.
“I don’t think she was doing so much figuring the first year.”
“You’d better clear out,” Thomas Hudson had said. “If you don’t think she was figuring the first year you’d better go a long way away.”
“She writes very powerful letters. Going away would be worse. No. I’m going to stay here and go on the town. I’m going to cure it for keeps.”
After he and this girl split up in Paris, Roger was on the town; really on the town. He joked about it and made fun of himself; but he was very angry inside for having made such a profound fool of himself and he took his talent for being faithful to people, which was the best one he had, next to the ones for painting and writing and his various good human and animal traits, and beat and belabored that talent miserably. He was no good to anyone when he was on the town, especially to himself, and he knew it and hated it and he took pleasure in pulling down the pillars of the temple. It was a very good and strongly built temple and when it is constructed inside yourself it is not so easy to pull down. But he did as good a job as he could.
He had three girls in a row, no one of whom Thomas Hudson could be more than civil to and the only excuse for the last two might have been that they reminded him of the first one. This first one came right after the one he had just broken up with and she was sort of a world low for Roger although she went on to have a very successful career both in and out of bed and got herself a good piece of one of the third or fourth biggest fortunes in America and then married into another. She was named Thanis and Thomas Hudson remembered how Roger could never hear it without wincing and he wouldn’t say it; no one ever heard him say the name. He used to call her Bitchy the Great. She was dark with a lovely skin and she looked like a very young, well-groomed, fastidiously vicious member of the Cenci family. She had the morals of a vacuum cleaner and the soul of a pari-mutuel machine, a good figure, and that lovely vicious face, and she only stayed with Roger long enough to get ready for her first good step upwards in life.