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Bernard left then and went, as he had announced, to California. When he arrived there, he asked himself why he had come, and was unable to mention any other reason than that he had announced it. He began to feel restless again, and to drift back to those vague dissatisfactions which had accompanied him through his long journey in the far East. He succeeded, however, in keeping these unreasonable feelings at bay for some time. He strove to occupy himself, to take an interest in Californian problems. Bernard, however, was neither an economist nor a cattle-fancier, and he found that, as the phrase is, there was not a great deal to take hold of. He wandered about, admired the climate and the big peaches, thought a while of going to Japan, and ended by going to Mexico. In this way he passed several months, and justified, in the eyes of other people at least, his long journey across the Continent. At last he made it again, in the opposite sense. He went back to New York, where the summer had already begun, and here he invented a solution of the difficulty presented by life to a culpably unoccupied and ill-regulated man. The solution was not in the least original, and I am almost ashamed to mention so stale and conventional a device. Bernard simply conceived the plan of returning to Europe. Such as it was, however, he carried it out
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