—Not goodbye; all right, who had had so many fathers as to have neither love nor pride to receive or inflict, neither honor nor shame to share or bequeath; to whom one place was the same as another, like to a cat—cosmopolitan New Orleans or bucolic Mississippi: his own inherited and heritable Florentine lamps and gilded toilet seats and tufted mirrors, or a little jerkwater college not ten years old; champagne in the octoroon’s boudoir or whiskey on a harsh new table in a monk’s cell and a country youth, a bucolic heir apparent who had probably never spent a dozen nights outside of his paternal house (unless perhaps to lie fully dressed beside a fire in the woods listening to dogs running) until he came to school, whom he watched aping his clothing carriage speech and all and (the youth) completely unaware that he was doing it, who (the youth) over the bottle one night said, blurted—no, not blurted: it would be fumbling, groping: and he (the cosmopolite ten years the youth’s senior almost, lounging in one of the silk robes the like of which the youth had never seen before and believed that only women wore) watching the youth blush fiery red yet still face him, still look him straight in the eye while he fumbled, groped, blurted with abrupt complete irrelevance: ‘If I had a brother, I wouldn’t want him to be a younger brother’ and he: ‘Ah?’ and the youth: ‘No.