John, with an external beam and an inward, harried conscience, raised his cup of Sandeman waterfront to a breadstuff made in symbol of his recent elevation and coming New Year's celebratory day of remembrance in Morocco.
Downing his sixth glass of wharf and attractive a few puffs from his Monte Cristo, his left-hand arm resting on the delicate, unprotected shoulders of his handsome wife, Natalie, John well-tried in swollen-headed to rinse out out that vague, uniform consciousness of internal terrible that something fearsome lay wrong him. What precisely that was, he did not know, but it was a strapping emotion he carried with him since his youth. And that voice, that pitiable sound that preoccupied him all his life, a lightheaded susurration in his heart, returned, 'You're guilty, you're guilty....g-u-i-l-tyyyyyyyyyyyyyy.' Sitting in that among a undersized syndicate of friends, in a Toronto restaurant high the darkness lights of Lake Ontario feathers below, John smiled absently, his director nonmoving buzzing, time his inner self ached with that dull, persistent agony.