Up in the supper room the air was hot. The table,
littered with napkins and ash-trays, was old and stale.
It was between dances as they entered, and Muriel
Kane looked up with roguishness extraordinary.
“Well, where have you been?”
“To call up mother,” answered Gloria coolly.
“I promised her I would. Did we miss a
dance?”
Then followed an incident that though slight in itself
Anthony had cause to reflect on many years afterward.
Joseph Bloeckman, leaning well back in his chair,
fixed him with a peculiar glance, in which several
emotions were curiously and inextricably mingled.
He did not greet Gloria except by rising, and he immediately
resumed a conversation with Richard Caramel about
the influence of literature on the moving pictures.
The stark and unexpected miracle of a night fades
out with the lingering death of the last stars and
the premature birth of the first newsboys. The
flame retreats to some remote and platonic fire; the
white heat has gone from the iron and the glow from
the coal.
Along the shelves of Anthony’s library, filling
a wall amply, crept a chill and insolent pencil of
sunlight touching with frigid disapproval Therese
of France and Ann the Superwoman, Jenny of the Orient
Ballet and Zuleika the Conjurer—and Hoosier
Cora—then down a shelf and into the years,
resting pityingly on the over-invoked shades of Helen,
Thais, Salome, and Cleopatra.
Anthony, shaved and bathed, sat in his most deeply
cushioned chair and watched it until at the steady
rising of the sun it lay glinting for a moment on
the silk ends of the rug—and went out.
It was ten o’clock. The Sunday Times, scattered
about his feet, proclaimed by rotogravure and editorial,
by social revelation and sporting sheet, that the
world had been tremendously engrossed during the past
week in the business of moving toward some splendid
if somewhat indeterminate goal. For his part
Anthony had been once to his grandfather’s,
twice to his broker’s, and three times to his
tailor’s—and in the last hour of the
week’s last day he had kissed a very beautiful
and charming girl.
When he reached home his imagination had been teeming
with high pitched, unfamiliar dreams. There was
suddenly no question on his mind, no eternal problem
for a solution and resolution. He had experienced
an emotion that was neither mental nor physical, nor
merely a mixture of the two, and the love of life
absorbed him for the present to the exclusion of all
else. He was content to let the experiment remain
isolated and unique. Almost impersonally he was
convinced that no woman he had ever met compared in
any way with Gloria. She was deeply herself;
she was immeasurably sincere—of these things
he was certain. Beside her the two dozen schoolgirls
and debutantes, young married women and waifs and
strays whom he had known were so many females, in the
word’s most contemptuous sense, breeders and
bearers, exuding still that faintly odorous atmosphere
of the cave and the nursery.
