"Sure, I know what you mean. No, but about the Italian?" "What a silly question Wenny," said Fanshaw. "Perhaps not so silly. Who can tell?" They were silent a moment. The orchestra was playing The Soldiers Chorus. The waiter brought coffee. "And another bottle," said Wenny jauntily. Fanshaw frowned. They had had enough to drink. What a child Wenny was anyway. With unexpected tenderness he pictured himself putting him to bed drunk, unlacing his shoes, pulling off his trousers. A sudden desire came to him to draw a hand over Wenny's crisp short hair. "There is something strangely fantastically dismal about that gondola with its red light as an end to romance. I wonder where those stairs go." Nan nodded her head. "That's what I meant. I wonder if she is the girl.... No, Wenny, I'm glad you brought us here, even if we shall taste garlic for a week." "At least there is the satisfaction of having busted loose," said Wenny eagerly. "I never can understand the amazing way people put themselves out to be miserable." Fanshaw found himself suddenly welling with bitter irritation. "But, by God!" cried Wenny, "You have to put yourself out to live at all; every damn moment of your life you have to put yourself out not to fossilize. Most people are mere wax figures in a show window. Have you seen a dredger ever, a lot of buckets in a row on a chain going up an inclined plane. That's what people are, tied in a row on the great dredger of society.... I want to be a bucket standing on my own bottom, alone.... Why are you laughing Nan?" "You are so eager about it, Wenny, dear." "What in hell would you be eager about if not that?" "Why be too eager about anything?" put in Fanshaw in his most languid voice. "O you make me tired, Fanshaw." Fanshaw flushed. The little rat, he thought, I'd like to smack him for being so silly. If he could get all that energy into something worth while. That's the difference between us and people like Pico della Mirandola or Petrarch. They could get all that energy into thought, art for the liberation of the world. We fritter it in silly complications. What a clever idea; if he could only make Wenny understand that. "That's where my music comes in," Nan was saying, her voice grown suddenly tense as Wenny's. "By living it, by making myself great in it, I can bust loose of this fearful round of existence. What a wonderful phrase that is, the wheel of Karma! I understand why women throw themselves head over heels at the most puny man. They have got to escape, if only for a moment, from the humdrum, all the little silly objects, pots and pans and spools of thread that make up our lives. I've got to get that in my music. Nothing else matters." Fanshaw was thinking for some reason of Dürer's portrait of himself at the age of twenty-eight. There was a man who had never needed to bust loose. They must have been less tied to the wheel in those days.