It is curious that in proportion as the craving for drink diminished its place was taken by another craving for what I knew I couldn’t have. There was every reason why I couldn’t have it, why I could never have it. Atlantic City offered me, therefore, the readiest means of flight. When that should be over I was planning a still further retirement. Sterling Barry was in California, directing the first stages of the erection of a block of university buildings in which he took great pride. Coningsby himself had suggested that when the Atlantic City job was finished there would be an opening for me there if I cared to make a bid for it. I did so care, and he promised to speak for me. Once I reached the Pacific, I was resolved not to come back for years, and perhaps never to come back at all. It is lucky for me that I am temperamentally inclined to look forward. The retrospective view in my case would very soon have led me back to Greeley’s Slip, but I was rarely inclined to dwell on it. Once when I was crossing the Atlantic as a small boy our steamer had run on the rocks at Cape Clear. To enable us to get off her before she slipped back into the water and went down, long rope ladders were lowered to us from the top of the cliff, and up them we had to climb. This we did in a foggy Irish dawn, seeing just the rope rung ahead of us. Had we been able to look farther up the face of the cliff my mother and sisters would hardly have had the nerve for the ascent. As it was, they could see that single rung and no more, and so could keep their gaze upward without fear. In the same way I kept my own gaze forward. I tried not to look ahead of the day, and at Atlantic City the days, even in November, were bearable enough. The booming of the long miles of breakers acted on me as a sedative. They dulled memory; they dulled pain; at the same time they incited me to work as the piercing wail of the bagpipes incites the Highlander to fight. I got companionship from them and a sense of timelessness. In their roll and tumble and crash I could hear the _poluphoisboio thalasses_ in which Homer put the sound of breakers forever into speech. So November went by, and a great part of December. Christmas was approaching, and I was eager to have it over. Not that it mattered to me; but the sense that there was a gay companionship in the world from which I was excluded got slightly on my nerves. Cantyre, who came down to spend a week-end with me whenever he could, having to go for that season to his relatives in Ohio, I looked for nothing more festal than a merry meal with Lovey.