You are the loveliest thing that I have ever known.

Want any of this stuff? Jordan?... Nick?" I didn't answer. Nick?" he asked again. What?" Want any?" No... I just remembered that today's my birthday." I was thirty. Before me stretched the portentous, menacing road of a new decade.

There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth-yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams...... And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while, why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed... He stretched out his arms to the crystalline, radiant sky. I know myself," he cried, "but that is all.

It was as if for the remainder of his life he was condemned to carry with him the egos of certain people, early met and early loved, and to be only as complete as they were complete themselves. There was some element of loneliness involved--so easy to be loved--so hard to love.

They slipped briskly into an intimacy from which they never recovered.

Exploration was for those with a measure of peasant blood, those with big thighs and thick ankles who could take punishment as they took bread and salt, on every inch of flesh and spirit.

You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.