‘And Sara, of course.’

‘Except when she says fool things like my being a slave of habit.’

Resolutely he flopped on the pillow again. A truce to all this chatter. He was a man of resolute action, and he was going to sleep. Yes, he’d never be able to get away; he had enough nerve to admit it, when he had taken a licking.

He lay awake watching the shadows move against the yellow window blinds and trying to remember where he had heard a phrase, meaningless to him and exciting and a little sad:

‘We take the Golden Road to Samarkand.’

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Last updated Sunday, March 27, 2016 at 11:57

The Prodigal Parents, by Sinclair Lewis

Chapter 12

The morning after his birthday, he wondered what it was that had been plaguing his sleep — something confused and risky. He was aghast as he remembered that he had made threats about becoming a Kipling hero.

But slowly, as morning strength flowed into him, he rejoiced. Yes! They hadn’t licked him! He would do it! He would see many golden roads beyond the walls of Samarkand . . . Incidentally, where the deuce was Samarkand?

It was a frowsy day, cold for mid-spring, with a meaningless drizzle that seemed more to rise from the sticky brown earth than to drop from the disapproving skies. The rain was as dreary as Sara’s charge of last evening that he had been so imprisoned in ruts that he couldn’t even look over the edges.

In his shaky zest for freedom, he tried to defy the thought of Sara, but he shrewdly watched himself during the routine of dressing; he really saw himself; and that is, for any man over thirty-five, no joyful sight before breakfast. He stood apart and spied on his own fussing. He noticed that always, on rising, he first looked at the still-sleeping Hazel, to see if she was really there and still alive. On chilly mornings he always completed the first layers of dressing in the warm bathroom. He discovered that he always — but invariably with the prickliest discomfort if he failed to follow the rite — hung his underclothes on the bathroom hooks in the same order, with some fidgety notion of its being easier thus to dress after his bath.

He noticed that, perhaps every morning for a good many years, he had daily protested, ‘All nonsense, this daily bath business. As kids we only got bathed once a week, didn’t we, and we didn’t smell so bad, did we?’

He noticed that he always soaped his feet before soaping his knees, and that it was a struggle to reverse that order. He noticed that it maddened him to find that the maid had left his bottle of mouthwash on the window-sill instead of where, by all the ritual proprieties, it belonged — in the medicine chest, and not just stuck any old where in the medicine chest either, but put away nicely and correctly between the sodium bicarbonate and the aspirin.