Answer.--That I have about twenty-four dollars to my name.
Q.--You have the Lake Geneva estate.
A.--But I intend to keep it.
Q.--Can you live?
A.--I can't imagine not being able to. People make money in books and I've found that I can always do the things that people do in books. Really they are the only things I can do.
Q.--Be definite.
A.--I don't know what I'll do--nor have I much curiosity. To-morrow I'm going to leave New York for good. It's a bad town unless you're on top of it.
Q.--Do you want a lot of money?
A.--No. I am merely afraid of being poor.
Q.--Very afraid?
A.--Just passively afraid.
Q.--Where are you drifting?
A.--Don't ask me!
Q.--Don't you care?
A.--Rather. I don't want to commit moral suicide.
Q.--Have you no interests left?
A.--None. I've no more virtue to lose. Just as a cooling pot gives off heat, so all through youth and adolescence we give off calories of virtue. That's what's called ingenuousness.
Q.--An interesting idea.
A.--That's why a "good man going wrong" attracts people. They stand around and literally warm themselves at the calories of virtue he gives off. Sarah makes an unsophisticated remark and the faces simper in delight--"How innocent the poor child is!" They're warming themselves at her virtue. But Sarah sees the simper and never makes that remark again. Only she feels a little colder after that.
Q.--All your calories gone?
A.--All of them. I'm beginning to warm myself at other people's virtue.
Q.--Are you corrupt?
A.--I think so. I'm not sure. I'm not sure about good and evil at all any more.
Q.--Is that a bad sign in itself?
A.--Not necessarily.
Q.--What would be the test of corruption?
A.--Becoming really insincere--calling myself "not such a bad fellow," thinking I regretted my lost youth when I only envy the delights of losing it. Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the pure, simple state they were in before they ate the candy. They don't. They just want the fun of eating it all over again. The matron doesn't want to repeat her girlhood--she wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don't want to repeat my innocence. I want the pleasure of losing it again.
Q.--Where are you drifting?
This dialogue merged grotesquely into his mind's most familiar state--a grotesque blending of desires, worries, exterior impressions and physical reactions.
One Hundred and Twenty-seventh Street--or One Hundred and Thirty-seventh Street.... Two and three look alike--no, not much. Seat damp... are clothes absorbing wetness from seat, or seat absorbing dryness from clothes?... Sitting on wet substance gave appendicitis, so Froggy Parker's mother said. Well, he'd had it--I'll sue the steamboat company, Beatrice said, and my uncle has a quarter interest--did Beatrice go to heaven?... probably not--He represented Beatrice's immortality, also love-affairs of numerous dead men who surely had never thought of him... if it wasn't appendicitis, influenza maybe. What? One Hundred and Twentieth Street? That must have been One Hundred and Twelfth back there. One O Two instead of One Two Seven. Rosalind not like Beatrice, Eleanor like Beatrice, only wilder and brainier. Apartments along here expensive--probably hundred and fifty a month--maybe two hundred. Uncle had only paid hundred a month for whole great big house in Minneapolis. Question--were the stairs on the left or right as you came in? Anyway, in 12 Univee they were straight back and to the left. What a dirty river--want to go down there and see if it's dirty--French rivers all brown or black, so were Southern rivers. Twenty-four dollars meant four hundred and eighty doughnuts.