“I haven't any idea beyond the realization that I can't stay here taking up your room and Juan's time. It seems to me that for a month he has done nothing but concern himself with my comfort. I did, in Havana, while Savina was living, think of writing; but I have given it up because it would involve me in so much that is disagreeable. The amazing fact is that, since I have acquired a degree of wisdom, there is nothing for me to do, nowhere to go. The truth, I have always heard, will make you free; but for what, Daniel? What is it the truth will make you free for except to live in the solitude of public hatred? When I refuse, as I certainly shall, to return to Fanny the world where I might accomplish something will be closed to me. “I could be a farmer if it weren't for the impossibility of my sleeping through the early part of the night; my hands are too stiff to learn a trade. I don't want to learn a trade!” he exclaimed. “And as for starting more stock companies, rolling greater quantities of refuse into cigarettes or bottling harmless colored water, or controlling a news sheet in the interest of my other interests--” he could think of no term sufficiently descriptive of his remoteness from all that. “I shall have to be what a universal Eastlake will prefer to call me. I'd stay here, at La Quinta, if you could find something for me to do--like picking the limes fresh for the Daiquiri cocktails. Do you think your company would carry me on its rolls for that? I could gather them in the morning and evening, when it was cooler. Thank God, I haven't any material ambition. I like the clothes, the life, of that nigger, the capataz, who rode by, as well as most. I'd sit up on the mirador and keep--what do you call it?--the veija, for months on end.” The servant, Juan, small and dark in his white house coat, appeared with a tray on which two glasses with stems held a fragrant amber liquid. “That is perfection,” Lee murmured; “where else could it be found? Advise me, Daniel,” his voice was both light and serious. “You have never been known to give advice, but certainly my case is unusual enough to warrant extraordinary pains. Shall I make a neat hole at the proper point in my skull; or, better yet, put half a grain of a drug that will occur to you on my tongue and close my mouth on further indiscretions? That has its aspects. But not so strongly after one of Juan's drinks; they are distilled illusions, vain dreams still of hope. They have all the brave ring of accomplishment without its effort. But I can see the end even of them--atrophy. Soon Cytherea will go into the attic, have her nose broken, and the rats will eat the clothes from her indifferent body. Cytherea on a pearl shell in the Ionic Sea... I was one of her train, Daniel.” He leaned sharply forward-- Daniel Randon was asleep. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Cytherea, by Joseph Hergesheimer