“No, he thought, when everything you do, you do too long, and do too late, you can't expect to find the people still there. The people all are gone. The party's over and you are with your hostess now.I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.”

“I'm getting as bored with dying as with everything else, he thought.'It's a bore,' he said out loud.'What is, my dear?''Anything you do too bloody long.”

“But walking down the stairs feeling each stair carefully and holding to the banister he thought, I must get her away and get her away as soon as I can without hurting her. Because I am not doing too well at this. That I can promise you. But what else can you do? Nothing, he thought. There's nothing you can do. But maybe, as you go along, you will get good at it.”

“It's a bore," he said out loud."What is, my dear?""Anything you do too bloody long.”

“It is the light of course but it is necessary that the place be clean and pleasant. You do not want music. Certainly you do not want music. Nor can you stand before a bar with dignity although that is all that is provided for these hours. What did he fear? It was not fear or dread. It was a nothing that he knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was nothing too.”

“Fish," the old man said. "Fish, you are going to have to die anyway. Do you have to kill me too?”

“He had had his life and it was over and then he went on living it again with different people and more money, with the best of the same places, and some new ones.You kept from thinking and it was all marvellous. You were equipped with good insides so that you did not go to pieces that way, the way most of them had, and you made an attitude that you cared nothing for the work you used to do, now that you could no longer do it.”