Excerpt from The Isle of Life: A Romance

Sebastian Maure awoke to great lethargy of brain and body. His eyeballs burned. His skin felt dry and shrivelled. His throat was parched, and irritated by countless cigarettes. He began to cough, weakly, yet with sufficient force to make his head feel as if it were going to explode. Repressing a groan, he rolled over on his back, gazed at the ceiling, and tried to remember where he was.

The previous evening, on reaching Rome, he had alighted at the Grand Hotel, bathed, changed into evening dress, and set out for the Corso. There, in front of Aragno's Café, he had been welcomed back by Márchese Tito di Torredidone, a young Sicilian officer of the Genoa Cavalry, and by Andreas Ro-manovitch Tchemaieff, an attaché of the Russian Embassy. With these two he had gone upstairs to the Hunt Club. They had dined there. Afterward, they had played interminable card-games in the outer room. Later, they had certainly met some actresses or opera-singers for supper-perhaps in the Regina Restaurant...

His memory exhausted at this point, he began to inspect his present surroundings, which he was not conscious of having seen before.

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