He smiled, recognizing an old flippant phrase, and let his hand drop while he recalled Mariana—­turning to him to hook her gown, constructing annoying towers with the dominoes, reprehensible and amusing.  He resumed reading: 

“It would be wonderful if—­no, it is wonderful!  But Howat, I can tell only you this, I wish oranges had never been invented.”  He drew his mouth into a compressed line.  James was drinking.  He remembered when the other first made the concoction of orange juice and brandy; he saw him clearly, leaning in the doorway to the dining room, with the emptied goblet, and a curious, introspective expression on his mobile countenance.  “He ought to be hung!” he exclaimed sharply.  The fellow should see himself as a mat for Mariana’s feet.  But that wasn’t life, he realized; existence seemed to become more and more heedless of the proprieties, of the simplest concessions to duty.  He saw the world as a ship which, admirably navigated a score or more years ago, had jammed its rudder.  No one could predict what rocks the unmanageable sphere might be driving for.

The significance born by that sentence robbed the remainder of the letter of pleasure.  He read that Mariana had ordered the customary gift of cigarettes, and hoped they would last him longer than everybody knew they would.  The implied affection of all the paragraphs was visible in the last words.  He put the letter carefully away.  The cigarettes were sufficient for a considerable time beyond customary.  Something of his appetite had gone; the periods of half wakeful slumber in his chair drew out through whole evenings.  The actual world retreated; his memories, as bright as ever, became a little confused; the years, figures, mingled incongruously; famous arias were transposed to operas in which they had not been sung.

Winter retreated, but the latter part of March and April were bitterly cold; no leaves appeared; the ground remained barren; he seldom got out.

The albums of programmes were brought from their place on the low shelves, but now, more than often, they were barely opened, scanned.  Then, on an evening when belated snow was sifting through the cracks of the solid shutters, he came on an oblong package, wrapped in strong paper.  He opened it, in a momentary revival of interest, of life.  It was a tall ledger, bound in crumbling calf, with stained and wrinkled leaves.  Howat had not seen it for twenty years, but he recalled immediately that it was a forge book kept in Gilbert Penny’s day; then Myrtle Forge had been new, that other Howat alive.  He opened it carefully, powdered his knees with leather dust, and studied the faded entries; what flourishing, pale violet initials, what rubicund lines and endings!