VIII
During the next weeks d**k experienced a vast dissatisfaction. The pathological origin and mechanistic defeat of the affair left a flat and metallic taste. Nicole’s emotions had been used unfairly, what if they turned out to have been his own? Necessarily he must absent himself from felicity a while in dreams he saw her walking on the clinic path swinging her wide straw hat... .One time he saw her in person; as he walked past the Palace Hotel, a magnificent Rolls curved into the half-moon entrance. Small within its gigantic proportions, and buoyed up by the power of a hundred superfluous horses, sat Nicole and a young woman whom he assumed was her sister. Nicole saw him and momentarily her lips parted in an expression of fright. d**k shifted his hat and passed, yet for a moment the a
