—Anthony for the moment wanted fiercely
to paint her, to set her down now, as she was,
as, as with each relentless second she could never
be again.
“What were you thinking?” she asked.
“Just that I’m not a realist,” he
said, and then: “No, only the romanticist
preserves the things worth preserving.”
Out of the deep sophistication of Anthony an understanding
formed, nothing atavistic or obscure, indeed scarcely
physical at all, an understanding remembered from
the romancings of many generations of minds that as
she talked and caught his eyes and turned her lovely
head, she moved him as he had never been moved before.
The sheath that held her soul had assumed significance—that
was all. She was a sun, radiant, growing, gathering
light and storing it—then after an eternity
pouring it forth in a glance, the fragment of a sentence,
to that part of him that cherished all beauty and
all illusion.
THE CONNOISSEUR OF KISSES
From his undergraduate days as editor of The Harvard
Crimson Richard Caramel had desired to write.
But as a senior he had picked up the glorified illusion
that certain men were set aside for “service”
and, going into the world, were to accomplish a vague
yearnful something which would react either in eternal
reward or, at the least, in the personal satisfaction
of having striven for the greatest good of the greatest
number.
This spirit has long rocked the colleges in America.
It begins, as a rule, during the immaturities and
facile impressions of freshman year—sometimes
back in preparatory school. Prosperous apostles
known for their emotional acting go the rounds of
the universities and, by frightening the amiable sheep
and dulling the quickening of interest and intellectual
curiosity which is the purpose of all education, distil
a mysterious conviction of sin, harking back to childhood
crimes and to the ever-present menace of “women.”
To these lectures go the wicked youths to cheer and
joke and the timid to swallow the tasty pills, which
would be harmless if administered to farmers’
wives and pious drug-clerks but are rather dangerous
medicine for these “future leaders of men.”
This octopus was strong enough to wind a sinuous tentacle
about Richard Caramel. The year after his graduation
it called him into the slums of New York to muck about
with bewildered Italians as secretary to an “Alien
Young Men’s Rescue Association.” He
labored at it over a year before the monotony began
to weary him. The aliens kept coming inexhaustibly—Italians,
Poles, Scandinavians, Czechs, Armenians—with
the same wrongs, the same exceptionally ugly faces
and very much the same smells, though he fancied that
these grew more profuse and diverse as the months
passed. His eventual conclusions about the expediency
of service were vague, but concerning his own relation
to it they were abrupt and decisive. Any amiable
young man, his head ringing with the latest crusade,
could accomplish as much as he could with the debris
of Europe—and it was time for him to write.
