By easy stages Paul made his way northward through Italy, putting up at the cheapest pensions, resting in villages innocent of tourists, following in the wake of spring, overtaken by summer. The illness which had struck him down proved stubborn, and there were intervals when he was too weak to pursue his wanderings, when he could do little more than lie exposed to the sun, frightening away with a stick the lizards that scrambled up gorse-covered banks and darted between the hot flat rocks.
His objective was Paris. The thought of its neurotic atmosphere daunted him. Yet he was drawn back. He could only explain the urge on the ground that he had failed to fulfil there some mission which he had been predestined to fulfil, though in his present state the idea of hoping to fulfil any mission seemed the wildest mockery.
His past was a series of abdications, As a child he had been impelled forward by the vision of fulfilling a musical destiny he had, as it were, inherited from Aunt Verona; but his inability to do this had become patent in Vienna, the scene of her moral defeat. As a yourig man he had been lured on by the wonder and splendour of spiritual initiation; but the hard kernel of his ego had remained opaque when subjected to the rays, except for a few blessed moments. In the manner of a resigned
