Breathlessly Anthony scanned the dancers, scanned
the muddled lines trailing in single file in and out
among the tables, scanned the horn-blowing, kissing,
coughing, laughing, drinking parties under the great
full-bosomed flags which leaned in glowing color over
the pageantry and the sound.
Then he saw Gloria. She was sitting at a table
for two directly across the room. Her dress was
black, and above it her animated face, tinted with
the most glamourous rose, made, he thought, a spot
of poignant beauty on the room. His heart leaped
as though to a new music. He jostled his way
toward her and called her name just as the gray eyes
looked up and found him. For that instant as their
bodies met and melted, the world, the revel, the tumbling
whimper of the music faded to an ecstatic monotone
hushed as a song of bees.
“Oh, my Gloria!” he cried.
Her kiss was a cool rill flowing from her heart.
A MATTER OF AESTHETICS
On the night when Anthony had left for Camp Hooker
one year before, all that was left of the beautiful
Gloria Gilbert—her shell, her young and
lovely body—moved up the broad marble steps
of the Grand Central Station with the rhythm of the
engine beating in her ears like a dream, and out onto
Vanderbilt Avenue, where the huge bulk of the Biltmore
overhung, the street and, down at its low, gleaming
entrance, sucked in the many-colored opera-cloaks
of gorgeously dressed girls. For a moment she
paused by the taxi-stand and watched them—wondering
that but a few years before she had been of their
number, ever setting out for a radiant Somewhere,
always just about to have that ultimate passionate
adventure for which the girls’ cloaks were delicate
and beautifully furred, for which their cheeks were
painted and their hearts higher than the transitory
dome of pleasure that would engulf them, coiffure,
cloak, and all.
It was growing colder and the men passing had flipped
up the collars of their overcoats. This change
was kind to her. It would have been kinder still
had everything changed, weather, streets, and people,
and had she been whisked away, to wake in some high,
fresh-scented room, alone, and statuesque within and
without, as in her virginal and colorful past.
Inside the taxicab she wept impotent tears. That
she had not been happy with Anthony for over a year
mattered little. Recently his presence had been
no more than what it would awake in her of that memorable
June. The Anthony of late, irritable, weak, and
poor, could do no less than make her irritable in
turn—and bored with everything except the
fact that in a highly imaginative and eloquent youth
they had come together in an ecstatic revel of emotion.
Because of this mutually vivid memory she would have
done more for Anthony than for any other human—so
when she got into the taxicab she wept passionately,
and wanted to call his name aloud.
