He saw himself in long days and nights of anguish and despair, of
embittered love and baffled passion: youth enjoying one of its divine
prerogatives and the fullness thereof!
Pacing the floor of his room on Russian Hill, tramping over the mountains
across the Bay, doggedly awaiting that sole alleviation of mental suffering
in its early stages, a change of scene.
Finally the Hofer car was placed at his disposal and he started on his four
days' journey to New York; and this brief chapter, that his friends
thought so gruesome, was the least of his afflictions. The memory of his
twenty-four hours or more of close physical association with his sister's
corpse made any subsequent adventure with the dead seem tame. And at least
he was leaving behind him a State which seemed to have magnetized him
across six thousand miles to experience the horror and misery she had
in pickle for him. He reveled in the audible rush of the train that was
carrying him farther every moment from the girl who had cut down into the
core of his heart and left her indelible image on a remarkably good memory.
II
He had asked himself one day--it was his last in California and he had
taken his courage in his teeth and was on his way to call on Gora Dwight at
last, picking his steps through, the still smoking ruins down to Van Ness
Avenue--whether it would be possible for any man to suffer twice in a
lifetime as he had suffered since that hideous moment at Rincona, coming as
it did on top of an uncommon and terrible experience that had racked his
nerves and soul as it might not have done had he been seasoned by war or
even a few years older.
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