“That doesn’t cut any ice. I happen not to be in love with your mother. My interest in women does not lie entirely in their accidents but in their substance, and the substance of your mother appeals to me about as much as the substance of Mrs. Gonzales. However, the point is not that I am not in love with Shura Korf, but that I could be if I wanted to. I might add that I at one time conceived a major passion for a woman of forty and discontinued the affair only when she talked of divorcing her husband, a beauty-parlor operator, in order to marry me. And mind you, it was not her age that made such a marriage unappetizing to me. I am, and I acknowledge it without false modesty, extremely precocious and I have known for many years that marriage precludes love.”

Recognizing the source of his position, I said, “Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’ve been reading Confessions of a Young Man.”

“By that I assume you mean to imply that I picked up my ideas about matrimony from George Moore,” he said with a sneer. “The presentation of your charge is grotesquely naïve. My integrity obliges me to correct you: I am, to be sure, very similar to Moore, but the similarity antedated my reading of the Confessions. I have always been a citizen of the world, a pagan, an iconoclast, and from time immemorial my motto has been Ars longa est.”

“Are you going to be a writer, Nathan?”

“Of course,” he replied simply and his voice was surprised that I should ask the question. “I am a satirist.”

“What are you going to write? Poetry?”

“I will not choose my form until my soul is ready. My knowledge is vast but inchoate. At the moment, I am collecting experience. That is why I sought you out tonight. You interest me and when I say I love you, I am not using the word in its conventional sense. In a way, the word is almost synonymous with curious. I am curious to know what sort of person has emerged from that amazing combination, Hermann Marburg and Shura Korf.”

“Have you found out?”

“No, but I have a clue.”

I remembered, from long ago, the words of this boy’s mother: “So your kid is half Rooshun and half German, half Hun as they say.” I said, “Do you think I’m more like Mamma or like my father?”

“I can’t tell yet. If you got to be like your father, I’d want you to live with me—for a while at least. He was the most sensitive man I ever knew.”

“Did you know my father very well?”