And Clayton was conscious of a growing uneasiness.
How much of it was real, how much a pose? Was Nolan representative
of the cultured Irishman in America? And if he was, what would be
the effect of their anti-English mania? Would we find ourselves,
like the British, split into factions? Or would the country be drawn
together by trouble until it changed from a federation of states to
a great nation, united and unbeatable?
Were we really the melting pot of the world, and was war the fiery
furnace which was to fuse us together, or were there elements, like
Nolan, like the German-Americans, that would never fuse?
He left Nolan still irritable and explosive, and danced once with
Natalie, his only dance of the evening. Then, finding that Rodney
Page would see her to her car later, he went home.
He had a vague sense of disappointment, a return of the critical
mood of the early days of his return from France. He went to his
room and tried to read, but he gave it up, and lay, cigaret in hand,
thinking!
There ought to have come to a man, when he reached the middle span,
certain compensations for the things that had gone with his youth,
the call of adventure, the violent impulses of his early love life.
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