PARTISAN REVIEW
insult to himself and his defeated country. His lip would curl into a
small, angry sneer that looked as if it had come out of a permanent–
wave machine. "Ah, you Americans," he would say, "your streets
are paved with dollars."
The two friends, after the first night, spent on bad beds in an
airless room hung with soiled lace curtains, moved with a certain
thump into the best hotel next door. They would not have stayed
in any case, for the young man had a horror of the sordid, and the
best hotel proved, when you counted breakfast, to be cheaper than
its second-rate neighbor. Nevertheless, in the circumstances, the move
had a significant tone-they hoped to fray, if not to sever, their con–
nection with Mr. Sciarappa, and perhaps also, to tell the truth, to
insult him a little. The best hotel, half-requisitioned by the Allied
armies, smiled on them with brass and silver insignia, freshly washed
summer khaki and blond, straight, water-combed American hair;
when Mr. Sciarappa came for cocktails in the same gabardine suit,
he looked somehow liko a man in prison clothes or the inmate of a
mental institution. The young lady, who was the specialist in senti–
ments, felt toward him sorrow, shame, triumph.
They could not make out what he wanted of them.
Whatever business had, on the train, been hurrying him on
to Rome had presumably lost its urgency. He never mentioned it
again; indeed, the three spoke very little together, and it was this
that gave them that linked and wedded look. During the day he
disappeared, e..xcept for the luncheon aperitif. He went to Como, to
Genoa, and, once, in the Galleria, they saw him with an unshaven,
white-haired, morose-looking man whom he introduced as his brother–
in-law. In restaurants, he was forever jumping up from the table
with a gay little wave of the hand to greet a party that was in the
act of vanishing into the dark outdoors. Though he was a man who
twitched with sociability, whose conversation was a veritable memo
pad of given names, connections, ties, appointments, he seemed to be
unknown to the very waiters whom he directed in the insolent style
of an old customer. The brother-in-law, who plainly disliked him,
and they themselves, whom he hated, were his only friends.
The most remarkable symptom of this hatred, which ate into the
conversation leaving acid holes of boredom, which kept him glancing
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