His problem was still unsolved. He wanted to get back to work, he wanted company, he wanted <i>life</i> again. As he came into the lobby, the woman of the first night passed by him again. She looked at him as she came, and smiled as she passed.
That, he thought, is a lovely woman. He stared at her back. How old would you say she is? Late twenties, not a day over thirty. Yet with a serenity in the eyes, in the smile somehow, that gives the impression of lifetimes of living. Yet not a day over thirty, surely no older than that.
That, he thought, is what I need. A woman like that to sleep with and, yes, to be with, even to talk with. She would not be like the one upstairs. But, he thought, one does not buy a woman like that. One marries her. Somehow, without knowing, he knew that.
He returned to his own room, stripped and consulted the mirror. Dye his hair, that was really all he needed. He smiled into the mirror. Forty, he thought, even thirty-five. Certainly, with this tan and slim body and his hair dyed, thirty-five at the most.
He went to bed, happily making plans. A new life opened up for him.
He would take a new name; he would live again. There was nothing to stop him.
That night, in the Sea Lion Hotel in Miami Beach, Henry Talbot died.
Two months later Arnold Bottal, an experimental nuclear physicist of perhaps thirty-five, and his charming wife--with exquisite, nearly purple Eurasian eyes--joined the new country club in Lincoln Hills, New York, where Bottal had newly joined the Applied Physics Division of the Carbide Nuclear Company.
This Arnold Bottal was not a brilliant physicist, but he was certainly competent in his job. The company was satisfied with him. He and his wife bought a bubble home in the suburbs of Lincoln Hills and, together with their cat Bucephalus, lived happily ever after.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of East In The Morning, by David E. Fisher
