was no one alive for whom he could now make a sacrifice. He was, indeed, living for himself alone now. He intended to do as he wished, go where he liked, know whom he fancied. He was breathless with the breadth of the opened prospect. There were no restrictions, no responsibilities of any kind. Incipit vita nuova! Incipit vita nuova! And his mother had to die to give him this freedom!
That was the complexity of life. It was a series of patterns. One weaver wove one way, another quite a different way. And no possibility of change. You patronized one weaver or another and you had to stick by your choice. He understood now. It was all quite clear to him. Life was simple to those who knew how to take what they wanted. He was one of these favoured ones; the Countess, in her way, another. For Lennie, even Clara, people who let life baffle them, who patronized the weavers that tangled the yarn, he could feel nothing but contempt.
He saw himself sitting on a sunlit Italian hill; olive-trees and marble ruins rose before him in the soft air beneath the azure sky. Below him lay the deeper blue of the Mediterranean. The vision was as crystal to him as though he had been there. Quite suddenly, he realized that he had been there, that Italy, Paris, all the rest, he had imagined fully before experiencing them. Perhaps all his life would be like this, a foreseeing of experience, a con-
