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PARTISAN REVIEW
above all patient, impatient only with impatience and intolerance,
the liberal-minded and progressive Scotch-Canadian schoolmaster:
he absolutely refused to credit himself the gloomy train of thought
that had just been his, and indeed his mien contradicted it.
"... the eruption began on August 24 in the early afternoon
with the emission of vast quantities of vapor, mostly steam, which
rushed high into the air in a vertical shaft and terminated in a canopy
of cloud...."
Watching his wife, admiring her, touched by her enthusiasm,
a great feeling of tenderness for her overcame him. And then it
seemed to him for a moment that this was not unlike tenderness for
himself. In fact, half watching himself watch his wife in the mirror
he could almost imagine he saw the brightness and generosity of his
soul flashing off his glasses.
"Roddy, it does look a bit brighter, doesn't it? Well, if it doesn't
stop we'll just go in the rain!"
And now, as the time drew closer to leave it, the Restaurant
Vesuvius was already beginning to be invested with a certain nostalgia.
And after another glass of wine he took delight in reflecting how some–
thing in the very depths of his wife's being seemed to respond to a
moving fluctuant exciting scene: Tansy, pretty, a bit wild, delightful,
enthusiastic, was a born traveller, and he often wondered if her true
environment was not simply this moving ever changing background–
he reached in his pocket for some matches and a news clipping flut–
tered out.
"Is that Dad's latest news report £lying away?" Tansy said.
Roderick's father-in-law, who was a boat builder in British
Columbia, near Vancouver, scarcely ever wrote his daughter at all
and his correspondence with Roderick consisted of clippings from
newspapers. Sometimes bits would be marked, sometimes not; very
occasionally there would be half a page with some comment, in red
carpenter's pencil. The enclosure Roderick had received at the Ameri–
can Express in Naples this morning was rather more fulsome, and
consisted of half a page, mostly given over to advertisements for
consolidated brokers, limited petroleum companies and drilling com–
panies, and crowned by the gigantic headline: OIL! OIL! OIL!
Subsidiary headlines appeared: BRITISH COLUMBIA RIDING
HUGE INDUSTRIAL BOOM, OIL GAS ALUMINIUM SPEAR
