The years had not given him the kind of wisdom possessed by those who had used the trials of life to achieve ideals of the highest kind. But wisdom for that ordinary man on the street, where the grasp of god seldom reached, had given Lucius an insatiable and wanton want for adventure not really guided by principles of decent society but a society that merely wanted to survive and ward off the hardships that always plagued it. He traveled and traveled extensively. He explored the wilderness that flagellated and punished his soul so that in its most virulent state, the disease evident in his soul ruptured and tore. But, pain was not what it was, rather it was pleasure. His habits and goals never changed in his escapades. It was still going after women, spending an evening with them and insatiably indulging himself with everything that was purely sexual.

There was no one to hold him down; no one to stop or control his desires; no one to be father and mother to him, to guide him in his moral pitfalls. And there was no one to share the sorrow he reaps for what he did and what he will do.

He did not tell all this to his parents back in Pampanga, reneging on his promise. After all, what they didn’t know would not really hurt them. Innocence by silence was better than exploring things he thought they would not understand anyway. When he went back to Pampanga to visit them and his brothers, the subject of his love escapades were not brought up. Good times again and all else was left at that.

What they knew about his life was that it was prosperous and included a proper relationship to a gentlewoman. He talked of Solaya, of course, but anything deeper than the usual was left out. His progress in America was more important and definitely more interesting to his parents. Whatever was left to be said is blown in the provincial wind.

Into the arms of Solaya and his other girlfriend he fell upon his return to America. Back to the genteel escapes to the high country and the rough and tumble love-making to the women of the Berkeley and Oakland lowlands…back to the humdrum of his job…back again to a life where he felt so much at home.