Gideon Planish by Sinclair Lewis

For three nights the insomnia returned, with its mockery. For three nights he told himself that he was protecting Peony and her reputation; for three nights he retorted that he was really afraid only for his own job, which he would lose if it should be known that he was a tamperer with virgins. It seemed to him that his rooms, with their suggestions of a professorial life, their piles of The Annals of the Northern and Midwestern Society for Semantics, brought on his illness. If he could go off to a fresh rude place, then he could sleep.

After the third night of torture, on an edged late afternoon of November he tramped out to the Pridmore shack, by the rustic shore of Lake Elizabeth. He had told no one but his landlady. He was not in a mood to have Teckla come mothering him.