SOURCE: "Cozzens's Debt to Thomas Dekker in Ask Me Tomorrow," in Markham Review, Vol. 11, Fall, 1981, pp. 11-16.

[In the essay below, Cass compares the characters and themes of Cozzens's Ask Me Tomorrow with Thomas Dekker's play, The Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus (1599), contending that the play provided the basis for Cozzens's story.]

When James Gould Cozzens finished his ninth novel, he wanted to call it "Young Fortunatus," but Alfred Harcourt dissuaded him "on the reasonable grounds that since he had never [sic] heard of Old Fortunatus most other readers wouldn't have, and might wonder, irked, what the hell I meant. The book didn't sell at all so it could have made no difference and I wish now I had used it." [Cozzens in a letter to James B. Merriwether, 27 March 1962]. The first edition was published in 1940 as Ask Me Tomorrow. Later it was republished in the Uniform Edition as Ask Me Tomorrow or The Pleasant Comedy of Young Fortunatus. During Cozzens's lifetime it received very little attention, a fact that evidently disappointed him. A year before his death he wrote to me and spoke as if he regarded it as his most underrated book:

That promised account of the Spring Quarter course was wonderfully amusing (hell of a word; so I see sufferings of others as funny, huh?). Also it makes me wonder if for your projected purpose Ask Me Tomorrow (Uniform Edition text) might not be worth your looking at. Though not lacking 'literary milage' [sic] demands, it's fairly short, a virtue cardinal enough to excuse, perhaps, absence of Relevance ('Modren'), King Cong, sharks & (old aaf term) Nooky. Or do I really mean it happens to be the one book of mine that, finished, left me fairly content—no doubt because, not having tried to do too much, I wasn't forced to see chagrinned how short I came of all I aimed at to start. However: does anybody know a writer not dumb about his own work, so you judge. [Cozzens in a letter to Colin S. Cass, 15 July 1977]

The book now has a new opportunity to find an appreciative audience; it has been included in Just Representations: A James Gould Cozzens Reader. Reexamination should begin with the rejected title, which survived as a subtitle and has never been explained. Cozzens wanted to name his novel after the play by Thomas Dekker called The Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus, and it's time we understood why.

Since students of Cozzens are apparently unfamiliar with Old Fortunatus, a synopsis may be helpful. The play concerns an unsuccessful old Cypriot named Fortunatus who, lost in a forest, meets the goddess Fortune. Calling him Fortune's minion, she offers him wisdom, strength, health, beauty, long life, or riches. When he prefers riches, she decries his foolish refusal of wisdom. Nevertheless, she bestows a purse that will be inexhaustible while Fortunatus and his two sons live. As Fortune leaves, she says contemptuously, "now goe dwell with cares and quickly die" (I.i.), but Fortunatus thinks, "If I die to morrow, ile be merrie to day …" (I.i.). So he returns, provides lavishly for his sons, Ampedo and Andelocia, and sets out to travel. Visiting Babylon, Fortunatus steals a hat that lets the wearer go instantly wherever he wants. Meanwhile, Andelocia squanders money and pious Ampedo spends none. Their father returns with the hat, but during a prideful speech he is interrupted by Fortune, who has reappeared to say that Fortunatus is "no sonne of Fortune, but her slaue" (II.ii.), whose fate is "to die when th'art most fortunate" (II.ii). Too late he regrets that he chose riches, but the goddess refuses to give his sons wisdom instead, and Andelocia gladly takes the purse as soon as Fortunatus dies.

The next scene is King Athelstane's court in England, where suitors woo the king's daughter, Agripyne. Andelocia arrives with the same intention. His wealth attracts great interest, but it also provokes royal resentments and intrigues. Athelstane's daughter, wheedling Andelocia's secret, lulls him to sleep and steals his purse, as he learns when Shaddow, his servant, needing money, wakes him up. After the discovery Shaddow still needs to know, "Shal I buy these spices to day or to morrow?"

      To morrow? I, to morrow thou shalt buy them,
      To morrow tell the Princesse I wil loue her,
      To morrow tell the king, ile banquet him,
      To morrow, Shaddow, will I giue thee glad,
      To morrow pride goes bare and lust acold.
      To morrow will the rich man feede the poore,
      And vice to morrow vertue will adore.
      To morrow beggers shall be crowned kings,
      This No-time, morrowes-time, no sweetnes sings:
      I pray thee hence: beare that to Agripyne (III.i.).

Andelocia skulks back to Cyprus, steals his brother's wishing hat, and revisits England disguised as a jewel merchant. Seizing Agripyne, he abducts both princess and purse to a wilderness, where Vertue and Vice have earlier been seen planting trees. While Andelocia climbs in the tree of Vice, Agripyne escapes. Getting down, Andelocia also finds he has sprouted horns. He sleeps. The deities return, Fortune to prolong his life, Vice to scoff, Vertue to accept his repentance, remove his horns, and teach him to recover his purse and hat.

Agripyne, safe in England, has just been promised to the Prince of Cyprus when Andelocia and Shaddow enter disguised as Irish costermongers. They peddle apples of Vice to Agripyne and two courtiers, Montrosse and Longauille. When next seen, these three have horns, and Cyprus moans, "To morrow should haue beene our marriage morne, / But now my bride is shame, thy bridegrome scorne" (V.i.). Newly disguised as a French physician, Andelocia cures Montrosse and Longauille. He abducts Agripyne a second time, but having recovered his purse and hat, he releases her and cures her horn, then returns the hat to his brother. But Longauille and Montrosse are eager for revenge. Capturing the brothers, they shackle them both in stocks, where Ampedo dies of misery. Before the courtiers strangle Andelocia, he, like Old Fortunatus, regrets that he loved riches above wisdom and that he forgot his vows to Vertue. He dies. Athelstane arrives, Fortune and Vice appearing simultaneously. Vice overrules Athelstane's harsh sentence upon the murderers. Fortune rebukes Athelstane, but then gives him the purse with the admonition, "England shall ne're be poore, if England striue, / Rather by vertue, then by wealth to thriue" (V.ii.). At last enters Vertue, now resplendent, and asserts her dominance over Fortune and Vice. For proof, she enjoins, "… Looke but on Fortunatus and his sonnes: / Of all the welth those gallants did possesse, / … / Their glorye's faded and their golden pride" (V. ii.).

Dekker himself is indebted for this tale to still earlier sources, though the exact line of transmission has been debated. Henslowe's diary records the "First Part of Old Fortunatus" as performed in 1596 [see Mary Leland Hunt, Thomas Dekker: A Study, 1911]. We do not know whether Dekker wrote it, nor whether there was a second part; in November, 1599, however, Dekker was paid for "the hole history of Fortunatus," which he then immediately revised for court performance, 27 December 1599, as "A commedie called Old Fortunatus in his newe lyuerie" [see Fredson Bowers' "Introduction" to The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 1970]. These English dramatic renditions derive in turn from one or more of the editions of the German Volksbuch, the earliest having been published at Augsburg in 1509. But even they are not the true origin of the Fortunatus story, which "is an aggregate of very heterogeneous elements…. Scarcely any class of mediaeval fiction has failed to contribute to the medley …" [Charles H. Herford, Studies in the Literary Relations of England and Germany in the Sixteenth Century, 1886].

For the present purpose we need go no further than Dekker. Cozzens's titles, "Ask Me Tomorrow" and "The Pleasant Comedy of Young Fortunatus," place Dekker's influence beyond dispute, and nothing suggests that Cozzens was familiar with the Volksbuch. The nature of Dekker's influence, however, is less obvious. Juxtaposition of novel and play shows that Cozzens agrees with his source in some ways, yet values it especially for the contrasts it brings to mind and the corrections it invites.

Since Dekker divides his attention about equally between two protagonists, Fortunatus and Andelocia, with Ampedo an important secondary character, one might ask, to whom is Francis Ellery, the protagonist of Ask Me Tomorrow, being compared if he's called Young Fortunatus? The answer is, there is no exact parallel between Francis and any one character in the play. Fortunatus seems an obvious choice, but he is old. (He is younger in the first ten chapters of the Volksbuch, but there is no important correspondence between events there and in Ask Me Tomorrow.) True, his sons are young enough to be comparable with Francis, who is twenty-three. Moreover, Andelocia has the long speech about tomorrows and is engrossed in a love quest, as Francis is too, but as Fortunatus is not. As for Ampedo, he resembles Francis in other ways, being habitually censorious, unpleasant, and falsely virtuous. But neither brother is ever called "Young Fortunatus."

Not precisely analogous to any one character, Francis can be usefully compared to all three. Dekker's intentions are chiefly moral, and although Cozzens does not press his own conclusions, the playwright's topics also interest the novelist. Dekker, however, distributes his reflections among three characters. This creates disunity, for in Act II he dispenses with one protagonist and begins over with another. It also causes redundancy, Andelocia's story being substantially the same as his father's with the addition of the courtship. Had Andelocia been the character originally favored by Fortune, then sent to Babylon for the hat before going to England, the Fortunatus subplot could have been eliminated entirely, though popular familiarity with the folk tale probably militated against such a revision. In any case, Cozzens, whose books are tightly constructed, consolidates in one character what Dekker and his predecessors dispersed among three.

About pride, for example, Dekker makes the same conventional observations in both subplots. Before Fortune lifts him up, Fortunatus is "sorrowes heire, and eldest sonne to shame" (I.i.). But since "Riches make all men proude" (II.Prol.), the old man's fate is interpreted in terms of pride: "Thy Sunne like glorie hath aduanc'd her selfe / Into the top of prides Meridian, / And downe amaine it comes" (II.ii.). His dying words are, "behold in me / The rotten strength of proud mortalitie" (II.ii.). Much the same is shown of Andelocia. King Athelstane resolves that "His pride weele somewhat tame …" (III.i.). Shaddow observes "what a horne plague followes coueteousnesse and pride" (V.ii.). The murderers say the brothers' "pride should cost their liues" (V.ii.). And Fortune, explaining their demise, tells us "their ryots made them poore, / And set these markes of miserable death, / On all their pride …" (V.ii.). Plainly, Dekker means to say something about pride, yet the theme is grafted onto the action rather than evolving from it: "Since even in his maturest work Dekker showed little skill in structure, it is not surprising to find that 'Old Fortunatus' sins more than ordinarily; a part of the confusion no doubt arose from the successive recastings that the play suffered, especially the introduction of Vice and Virtue with their befogging relations to Fortune, and perhaps the relegation of Andelocia's serious wrong-doings to the chorus, for there is nothing in the action that deserves the punishment of death" [Mary Leland Hunt, Thomas Dekker: A Study, 1911].

Cozzens examines pride in Francis Ellery, who begins like Fortunatus as "sorrowes heire, and eldest sonne to shame." We meet Francis saying good-bye to his mother, who has nothing but sorrows to bequeath. On the contrary, to support her he must stoop to tutoring. But the novel diverges sharply here from its model. The story of Fortunatus doesn't really develop until the goddess makes him rich. But Cozzens studies pride in a character who never escapes the poverty he starts with. A realistic modern novel cannot be compared too closely, of course, to an allegorical Elizabethan play, yet this departure is instructive. The action is naturally more plausible than in the play, since Cozzens dispenses with the deus ex machina—goddesses with their magical purses, hats, apples, and the rest. He also substitutes Francis for the highly unrepresentative Cypriots. Not a hero, a villain, nor a minion of Fortune, Francis Ellery, wishing for a fortune he never gets, is one of us.

In him, pride is genuinely interesting to contemplate, since it is so persistent, troublesome, and familiar, yet so insecurely founded. Not the Cardinal Sin of the homilist, Ellery's pride is the unpleasant habit of the everyday egotist. He finds that "The virtue of the vice of pride was the impossibility of self-pity; and Francis's mind … to please him was obliged to show him always fortunate…." Yet he chafes against "This damned business of being poorl," knowing that money always makes "its customary prompt appearance as the thing that mattered…." Old Fortunatus suffers, especially for modern readers, because we sympathize too readily with the proud. When Fortunatus, accepting his good fortune, resolves that "If I die to morrow, ile be merrie to day," or when he provides handsomely for his hungry sons, or when he cheats the sultan who was hoping to cheat him, our condemnations are likely to be half-hearted. Cozzens mostly shares Dekker's disapproval of pride, yet in Ask Me Tomorrow pride is convincingly contemptible, as when Francis "was ashamed to think that far from admiring as he should the patience she [his mother] must show …, he detested her patience as a humiliation in itself, a wound to pride reaching through her to him." Recognizing a subject still worth reflecting upon, Cozzens disembalms it, considers it in believable characters, and offers some ironic observations about it.

One such observation is embodied in the epigraph from Troilus and Cressida:

Ajax, Why should a man be proud? How doth pride grow? I know not what pride is.

Agamemnon, Your mind is the clearer, Ajax, and your virtues the fairer….

This epigraph is intelligible only in its Shakespearean context. Agamemnon, Ulysses, and Nestor are shrewdly flattering Ajax, the vain, doltish bruiser whom they mean to use against Hector while Achilles keeps to his tent:

AJAX: Is he [Achilles] so much? Do you not think he thinks himself a better man than I am?

AGAMEMNON: No question.

AJAX: Will you subscribe his thought, and say he is?

AGAMEMNON: No, noble Ajax; you are as strong, as valiant, as wise, no less noble, much more gentle, and altogether more tractable.

AJAX: Why should a man be proud? How doth pride grow? I know not what it is.

AGAMEMNON: Your mind is the clearer, Ajax, and your virtues the fairer. He that is proud eats up himself….

AJAX: I do hate a proud man, as I hate the engendering of toads.

NESTOR: [aside] Yet he loves himself. Is't not strange? [William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida, II.iii.]

By itself, Cozzens's epigraph seems to deny that Ajax is proud, and we might expect that Ellery, lacking the fortune that makes Fortunatus proud, should likewise be without pride. Reconsidered in context, however, Ajax is evidently as proud as Achilles, yet too foolish to realize it. Similarly, pride is Ellery's most persistent motive, no matter how unwarranted it might seem. Ajax's fatuity is exploited by others, moreover, who recognize pride as his secret weakness and turn it to their own advantage. Quite the same can be said of Ellery, who requires some managing, but who is no match for Mrs. Cunningham. The novel closes as the waiter proclaims, "Madame est serviel!," thereby reminding us that despite his proud reluctance to do so, Ellery keeps serving her, much as Ajax serves Agamemnon.

Old Fortunatus is also about riches, though Dekker's thoughts are difficult to untangle. He probably intends conventional deprecations of worldly wealth, as when Fortune tells the old man, "Farewel, vaine couetous foole, thou wilt repent, / That for the loue of drosse thou hast despised / Wisedomes diuine embrace…." But Fortunatus and Andelocia are guilty of various offenses: covetousness at first, then foolish preference for riches over wisdom, then pride over their wealth, and still later, abuse of the gift of riches. Stirred together this way, the Cypriots' misdeeds make muddy moralizing, particularly when Ampedo is punished for the opposite crime of despising his wealth, and when Athelstane is finally rewarded despite a greed which far exceeds that of the Cypriots.

In Ask Me Tomorrow Cozzens divides the complex question of riches. Like Dekker, he dislikes covetousness. Just as Ellery is proud without Fortunatus's fortune, so he is covetous without getting what he covets. In the first scene, Fortunatus says, "… I am very poore and verie patient, Patience is a vertue: would I were not vertuous, thats to say, not poore, but full of vice, (thats to say, ful of chinckes)" (I.i.). It is a poor man's idle wish, and Fortune's timely gift keeps it from seeming any worse. In the novel's first chapter, Ellery has a similar speech: "'God!' said Francis, 'I wish I had a hundred thousand dollars'." Besides recalling Fortunatus's wish, this passage echoes Cozzens's earlier remark about Italian adventurers (the passage occurs on p. 4 of the first edition, in the two-page prologue that Cozzens deleted from the Uniform Edition): "… Italian officers came in (perhaps with the wistful idea that they were going to meet and then easily marry a girl with a hundred thousand dollars) and sat and husbanded their drinks." Francis, who will not be handed any magical purse, may resent the imputation, but he exactly resembles these Italian adventurers. In this regard he is a realist's correction of Andelocia—not a suitor looking unsuccessfully for a bride to share his boundless fortune, but a penniless opportunist hunting a bride willing to share her fortune. Because he arrives empty-handed and plays on Lorna Higham's affection, Francis makes covetousness look more reprehensible than it seems in the Cypriots. He knows that "Authors were two for a nickel …" and that "two could and would live at least as cheaply and meanly as one." When proposing that Lorna nevertheless elope with him, he confesses—as if candor will change it—that "Of course I am trying to take advantage of you. Of course it isn't prudent, and so you are afraid." The prudent view is probably Gwen's:

Gwen kept her eye on the main point. As well as a girl who had a right to something called romance …, Lorna was a valuable investment … the finished product of invested money,… of invested time,… to fit her with special skills and accomplishments to keep house and raise children, not any old way, but in the style to which the sort of man she was meant to meet and marry would be accustomed. This fortunate man had conditions to fulfill; and one of them … was to lay on the line the cash to take up this investment. Then it would be time enough for him and Lorna to begin worrying about whether it was the nightingale and not the lark.

Seen this way ("The thought was sobering, one of those thoughts he tried to put aside….") Ellery's proposal means that with Lorna he would either live "as cheaply and meanly as one," or accept financial rescue from the family whose prize investment he had coveted and stolen. Thus Cozzens, in a more believable tale than Dekker's, also renders covetousness more convincingly distasteful.

Dekker's Cypriots also prefer riches over wisdom—quite a different matter from coveting the wealth of others. Fortunatus explains his preference:

Therefore dread sacred Empresse make me rich, My choice is store of gold; the rich are wise. He that vpon his backe rich garments weares, Is wise, though on his head grow Midas eares. Gold is the strength, the sinnewes of the world, The Health, the soule, the beautie most diuine, A maske of Gold hides all deformities; Gold is heauens phisicke, lifes restoratiue, Oh therefore make me rich … (I.i.).

Since Fortune tells him he'll be sorry, and the events prove her right, Dekker presumably agrees with her and means the old man's speech as a sample of folly.

But about the desirability of wealth Cozzens disagrees with Dekker, finding that Fortunatus's words are truer than Dekker knows. Wealth is examined most fully in the Cunninghams. Thanks to her late husband, Mrs. Cunningham needs no magic hat or bottomless purse, as her family's travels reveal. For Francis, indeed, she is his hat and purse. Such wealth ruins Fortunatus, but Mrs. Cunningham is another matter. Marrying her, Mr. Cunningham "considered himself the luckiest man in the world—without, Francis guessed, finding subsequently that he was very much in the wrong, either." Now a widow with two children, she is "as much a credit to her children as they were to her." There is even some conscious deification in the metaphors about her, as if to strengthen her resemblance to Dekker's goddesses, not his sinners: "Though personally she moved without a trace of ostentation, Walter, Francis, and Maggie, making in effect a train or suite, turned her entrance … into something of an event." Compare the stage direction in Old Fortunatus: "Enter Vertue, crownd: Nymphes and Kings attending on her …" (V. ii. 260). And again, "there was a bustle of people coming and going—proof enough that Mrs. Cunningham had arrived … Thousands at her bidding speed, Francis thought in the dazed levity of uncollected wits, and post o'er land and ocean without rest—." Francis's irony keeps this from being fulsome, but the allusion is to Milton's Sonnet XIX, where thousands at God's bidding speed.

Of course, Fortunatus goes too far in lauding riches. He says, "A maske of Gold hides all deformities" (I.i. 291), but all Mrs. Cunningham's money cannot mask her son's lameness. Ask Me Tomorrow is to some extent autobiographical, Cozzens having "… spent some months tutoring a nice kid who suffered from infantile paralysis while I also tried to act the published author…." But even if the "nice kid" is the model for Walter Cunningham, Cozzens could not miss the coincidence that Dekker repeatedly mentions "deformity" in Old Fortunatus. There, physical deformity always implies depravity, as in the horns that sprout on characters given to Vice: "my body hornes must beare, / Because my soule deformitie doth weare" (IV.i.). Walter, on the contrary, is one of literature's most delightful children, his deformity only heightening the comeliness of his character: "Walter's patience in his affliction, good temper, and politeness cost him, being expressions of a disposition, no special effort, and so perhaps deserved no special credit from the moral standpoint; but they were none the less ornaments to character." In fact, although Francis Ellery is "good-looking," spiritual deformities are more readily seen in him: "As for his character, he had what might as well be called a marked taste for wine and women, he was self-seeking and self-centered…."

Fortunatus overestimates wealth again when he calls it "heauens phisicke, lifes restoratiue," as Cozzens concedes when Walter nearly dies of asthma.

Preposterously,… there was notwithstanding no law, human or divine, against Walter, in an hour or less, being dead…. For years Walter's mother, and Maggie, and innumerable doctors had watched over him…. But, of course, it all could, maybe it all always did, go for nothing….

Certainly, as Dekker says, gold will be no help against death. Yet the example of the Cunninghams suggests that wealth is far more compatible with a pleasing and virtuous life than Dekker allows.

For Dekker the choice is between riches and wisdom. But Cozzens observes that a Mrs. Cunningham can be both rich and wise, and that a Francis Ellery can be both poor and foolish. Cozzens even predicts some correspondence between wealth and wisdom, for "People who are poor, while they may be estimable and virtuous, confess in the fact of poverty an incapacity for mastering their environment…." Fortunatus, categorically affirming that "the rich are wise," goes beyond Cozzens, yet rich Mrs. Cunningham never wears Midas ears, and poor Ellery does: "Given his choice, he would perhaps have preferred Mrs. Cunningham to mistake him for a sinister and dangerous schemer, weaving, resourceful and unprincipled, his subtle web; and that was good for a laugh, because she never could have made that mistake. There was only one fool there, and Francis was it." Ironies abound. Francis the tutor surely represents wisdom sooner than riches. But then he resents his job, and no riches are offered to him, though he covets them. Thus, there is no virtue in his lack of wealth. And although Mrs. Cunningham praises his learning, she is far wiser than he, and he is often downright foolish. Young Fortunatus thus lacks riches and wisdom as surely as Mrs. Cunningham has them.

It is not necessary to enumerate every correspondence between novel and play, but this study should not disregard the title Cozzens settled on: Ask Me Tomorrow. The exact phrase does not appear in Old Fortunatus, yet tomorrows are discussed at length, always to the same purpose: that a man like Fortunatus or Andelocia, who indulges in pleasant vices today, will regret them tomorrow. Just ask him.

Dekker calls his play The Pleasant Comedie of Old Fortunatus, yet it is pleasant and comical only in the technical sense of ending in a triumph for Vertue and a celebration of sorts. But the unhappy consequences of the characters' choices are unmistakable. All three characters are severely judged, their faults explicitly cause their grief, and all three die. In short, Dekker shows with melodramatic thoroughness that they reap what they sow. Whether people really do reap what they sow always interests Cozzens. Francis, worried because he is receiving no mail from Lorna, wonders whether his effort to seduce Faith Robertson is the reason:

What about that detestable misbehavior of his in Milan? Rationally or irrationally, the inexpungeable suspicion of the anxious heart is that the gods may be just; that you reap what you sow; that the nature of things operates by an awful law, a sort of lex talionis, which, whether you revere or deride any given moral code, will take an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and complaining will not help you.

The allusion is to Galatians 6:7—"Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap"—and Cozzens returns to the other half of it when Francis recalls that in school his grades "had been Ellery, 50, or 45, often enough (Be not deceived, God is not mocked—at least, not every time)…."

The possibility of such patterns is also mentioned in another connection: "as one thing follows another in life, patterns, often repeated, are formed…. Francis stood apprehensive,… wondering if … the pattern of a joke everybody knows might not be emerging. It begins with a man wishing; and then the man gets his wish and then (you could die laughing) he wishes he hadn't got it." This recalls Old Fortunatus, who wishes for gold, gets it, and then is sorry. But in exploiting such patterns, Cozzens avoids the simplistic thinking that mars Dekker's play. Francis gets no mail because he's been writing to the wrong address, not because he's reaping what he sowed. As for whether he will regret having gotten his wish to be in Cap d'Ail, the immediate answer is no. In other words, Cozzens lets it remain possible that the gloomy notion of a lex talionis "was most effective when half felt…. Put in words it sank to more or less imposing rodomontade." The beauty of Cozzens's plot, however, is that it is open ended where Dekker's is too snugly closed. Having introduced the idea of reaping and sowing, Cozzens gives most attention to what Francis sows. And we see just enough reaping to realize that Lex talionis, though not an invariable law and sometimes accepting an eye for a tooth, is nevertheless more than rodomontade.

About this you need only ask Francis tomorrow, for his misdeeds are constantly catching up to him. For example, he decides to drink too much in Milan:

"I'll have some brandy."

He sat silent and defiant while the waiter was out.

Tomorrow morning, when this triumph over the plaints of his better judgment would sicken him with exasperation, was somehow receding. Tonight, though diminishing hour by hour, magically expanded…. Tomorrow, on the other side of it, could take care of itself.

Tomorrow comes early, for nausea soon forces his undignified retreat, and weeks later the memory of this night still causes him fresh worry and disgust. The pattern repeats itself many times as Francis succumbs to temptations, only to regret them later. This behavior betrays a persistent childishness—ever interesting to Cozzens—in Francis and many adults. Francis knows that as a schoolboy what he needed "was a damned good licking, and never mind who was proud of what."

But of course that was now, when a few long-ago beatings would seem well exchanged for … habits of discipline and application…. Offered the choice ten years ago he doubted if he would have … cared to insure the future at the immediate expense of his backside.

Yet as the Milan episode shows, he continues to let tomorrow take care of itself, and it continues to disoblige him.

From Francis's viewpoint the novel ends like a more pleasant comedy for Young Fortunatus than for Old. Though still without the girl or the fortune, Francis has scraped through two predicaments. Walter has survived the asthmatic attack that occurred partly because of Francis's dereliction, and ironically, Francis is even being mistaken for "the hero of the occasion." Thus, he has not lost his job. And he is leaving Cap d'Ail before Faith Robertson arrives, so Lorna still doesn't know about Milan.

A peculiarity, however, is that the title line is not spoken by Francis, but by Lorna. This does not mean that it is inapplicable to him. Francis, like Fortunatus and Andelocia, will see his good fortune differently in time, even though on the last page he is still saying of himself, "How fortunate! How fortunate he always was!" In addition, by giving the title line to Lorna, Cozzens recalls the other half of Dekker's thought—not only that the apparently fortunate man will judge his case differently tomorrow, but that it will also be judged by others. Lorna refuses to elope at once. But as to whether she'll marry him at all, she says, "It's rather a rotten trick, and I know it; but this has been a hell of a day. I can't think. I just don't know. Ask me tomorrow—I mean, if you still want to." What Lorna would respond tomorrow cannot positively be known, since Faith Robertson probably wouldn't "say anything about my making a pass at her." Nevertheless, we do know that Francis's pride will not let him ask the question tomorrow, since the idea of seeing Faith again is awkward. "In fact, I can't do it. Not with Lorna around." So the result is the same as if Lorna, knowing all, were to make some final denunciation. The open-ended plot, however, dispensing with such climactic confrontations, represents an obvious gain for realism.

There is a comparable gain in the treatment of Mrs. Cunningham. She, at the end, plays Vertue's part, but Cozzens adroitly conveys her judgment of Young Fortunatus without a hyperdramatic scene and without spoiling the irony that Francis continues serving her. Mrs. Cunningham has begun to judge Francis earlier, when after many provocations she has felt she must criticize his "whole attitude," thus joining his many other judges: "Through the years, how many people had found themselves … less and less pleased with Francis, and so, sooner or later, had felt … that they must speak to him about his whole attitude!" The first time, Mrs. Cunningham relents, thinking she must have misjudged him. She does for him what Fortune does for Fortunatus (II.Prol.) and what Vertue does for Andelocia (IV.i.)—gives him a second chance he really has not merited.

Predictably, her second judgment, like Vertue's, will be less lenient. Tomorrow or another day she will disapprove of Francis just as Lorna will, and then Francis, reaping what he has sown, will not seem so fortunate. Very tidily, in fact, Lorna's and Mrs. Cunningham's views of Francis converge two pages from the end as he imagines explaining his plight to Mrs. Cunningham:

"… I happened to try to seduce a girl I didn't like very much at Milan. I was feeling depressed, and we'd had a couple of drinks, and she was there, and you know how it is—" A painful nervous laughter shook him. "… somehow I find the idea of seeing her again a little awkward. In fact, I can't do it. Not with Lorna around. What would you do, if you were I?"

What, indeed? What advice from Mrs. Cunningham to the lovelorn? You could not easily imagine telling Mrs. Cunningham such a story; but you could imagine easily enough what she, what any woman, would say to the problem presented: It serves you right! My advice is; it serves you right.