try to find out what meaning life has, if any. He can not do that in a stockbrokers’ office or a law firm. Larry and Isabel agree to postpone their marriage for a year so that he can go to Paris to try to clear his muddled thoughts. Elliott has plans for Larry's entrée into elite Parisian society, none of which materialize. In Paris, Larry immerses himself in the life of a student, living in a modest neighborhood, eating and drinking in neighborhood bistros, sightseeing by biking through the countryside, reading voraciously, attending lectures at the Sorbonne. After a year, Isabel and her mother come to Paris and on their arrival are met by Elliott. Elliott is surprised that Larry is there to meet them as well and Isabel's mother explains to him that Isabel wired Larry about their impending arrival. Larry can see a little more clearly now, and asks Isabel to marry him immediately. She does not understand his desire to learn and more significantly, cannot bear the thought of possibly spending all their lives in what she sees as poverty. She breaks their engagement. The night before she returns to Chicago she sets out to seduce Larry, planning to write later and tell him that she is pregnant, thus tricking him into marriage. She can not go through with it. When Elliott, who has been waiting up for her, asks why she did not go through with it, she answers that it was her “better nature.” Elliott scoffs and says it was her “Middle-western horse sense”—she will forget him. Cut to the reception after Isabel's marriage to Gray, which will provide her with the elite social and family life she craves. Sophie and Bob MacDonald are there. They have a baby, a little girl named Linda. Meanwhile, Larry works in a coal mine in France, where a drunk, debauched defrocked priest, Kosti, urges him travel to India to learn from a mystic. Larry studies at a monastery in the Himalayas under the tutelage of a Holy Man. Meanwhile, back in the States, the MacDonalds are in a car crash caused by a drunk driver. Bob and the baby are killed. In the hospital, the doctor asks Gray to tell Sophie, who is distraught and must be heavily sedated. Time passes. In India, the Holy Man tells Larry that he has got all he can get from books,