What would she say? Somehow I didn’t seem able to invent speeches for the glamour. But Rick was easy.

Hon, I ought to say I never meant you any harm. The altitude really did get to me. Affected my judgement, I guess. But I knew you’d be safe, he’d turn you down. He’s one of them, hon. Got a hang-up. My guess, you could call it an insight, hon, is that he’s never had anything to do with women at all. An invert. After all, hon, his mother brought him up and he was educated at a British private school and you know what that means. Now, hon, it’s time you got out of bed, we got to do St Peter’s before one, hon.

I was amused by my poor invention and felt better. I told myself I was making heavy weather of the whole thing. After Rome they would go to Dublin and walk the stations of poor old Bloom.

The billionaire, Halliday. Mary Lou admired him evidently, in her innocence. Wealth is a secondary sexual characteristic, like talent, like genius. I wondered for a while if I should drive back to Rome and look up Mr Halliday in the appropriate reference book but decided against it.

So at last I was able to trundle on, almost fancy-free and secure. There is one thing, though, that I noticed about myself. It was an indulgence. I feared to be the object of a biography. At the same time I was—no matter how hard I tried not to be—I was flattered by the possibility. Every time my mind flinched from some raw wound of my past it took refuge in a contemplation of my present distinction. Then, paring that same distinction down and down, reminding myself of this and that—of this writer and that writer—in the end my mind would be left with a faint feeling of the valuable, the unusual and the august. I caught myself gazing through new dark glasses and under my panama at groups of English tourists and telling myself, if they only knew! So I trundled on, or sat at my round white table and drank. It came to me—this was in a hotel near Aquila which was an escape place in the hot weather for Italians—it came to me that such a man could show Halliday and Rick Tucker—such a man was, in fact bigger than he had thought—thank you, Professor Tucker! Hold this one! I remember sitting and, as they used to say, discussing a very tolerable bottle of wine and watching the sun set in the general direction of Rome, and deciding that I was at peace because I knew precisely the book I was going to write. It would extend the Barclay range. It would deal with simple, eternal things, youth and innocence, purity and love. I bought a typewriter at once. The place was quiet. No one spoke to me except in the ways of most minimal courtesy. Liking sex but being incapable of love, indeed! Calmly, perhaps even augustly, I composed my book.