ys something more she's trying to get, and I'm always trying
to keep something away from her, and failing.

"And why? Do you want to know why, Aldrich? That's the cream of the
thing. Because we're so damnably in love with each other. She wants me
to live on her love. To have nothing else to live on. Do you know why
she won't have any children? Because she's jealous of them. Afraid
they'd get between us. She tries to make me jealous with that poodle of
hers--and she succeeds. With that! I'd like to wring his neck.

"Do you want to know what my notion of Heaven is? It would be to go off
alone, with one suit of clothes in a handbag, oh, and fifty or a hundred
dollars in my pocket--I wouldn't mind that; I don't want to be a
tramp--to some mining town, or mill town, or slum, where I could start a
general practise; where the things I'd get would be accident cases,
confinement cases; real things, urgent things, that night and day are
all alike to. I'd like to start again and be poor; get this stink of
easy money out of my nostrils. I'd like to see if I could make good on
my own; have something I could look at and say, 'That's mine. I did
that. I had to sweat for it.'

"I've been thinking about that for two years. It makes quite a
fancy-picture. There are a million details I can fill into it. A rotten
little office over a drug-store somewhere; people coming in with real
ills, and I curing them up and charging them a dollar, and sending them
away happy. I smoke a pipe because I can't afford cigars; get my meals
at lunch-counters. I sit up here--in this room--and think about it.

"I came back from New York, after that look at Rose, meaning to do it;
meaning to talk it out with Eleanor and tell her why, and then go.
Well, I talked. Talk's cheap. But I didn't go. I'll never go. I'll go on
getting softer and more of a fake; more dependent. And Eleanor will go
on eating me up, until the last thing in me that's me myself, is gone.
And then, some day, she'll look at me and see that I'm nothing. That I
have nothing left to love her with."

Then, with suddenly thickened speech (an affectation, perhaps) he looked
up at Rodney and demanded:

"What the hell are you looking so s-solemn about? Can't you take a joke?
Come along and have another drink. The night's young."

"No," Rodney said, "I'm going. And you'd better get to bed."

"A couple more drinks," Randolph said, "to put the cap on a jolly
evening. Always get drunk th-thoroughl