“That’s all I called you up to say-dear.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“I wish I could see you.”
“You will, to-morrow night.”
“That’s a long time, isn’t it?”
“Yes—” Her voice was reluctant.
His hand tightened on the receiver.
“Couldn’t I come to-night?” He dared
anything in the glory and revelation of that almost
whispered “yes.”
“I have a date.”
“Oh—”
“But I might—I might be able to break
it.”
“Oh!”—a sheer cry, a rhapsody.
“Gloria?”
“What?”
“I love you.”
Another pause and then:
“I—I’m glad.”
Happiness, remarked Maury Noble one day, is only the
first hour after the alleviation of some especially
intense misery. But oh, Anthony’s face
as he walked down the tenth-floor corridor of the Plaza
that night! His dark eyes were gleaming—around
his mouth were lines it was a kindness to see.
He was handsome then if never before, bound for one
of those immortal moments which come so radiantly
that their remembered light is enough to see by for
years.
He knocked and, at a word, entered. Gloria, dressed
in simple pink, starched and fresh as a flower, was
across the room, standing very still, and looking
at him wide-eyed.
As he closed the door behind him she gave a little
cry and moved swiftly over the intervening space,
her arms rising in a premature caress as she came
near. Together they crushed out the stiff folds
of her dress in one triumphant and enduring embrace.
THE RADIANT HOUR
After a fortnight Anthony and Gloria began to indulge
in “practical discussions,” as they called
those sessions when under the guise of severe realism
they walked in an eternal moonlight.
“Not as much as I do you,” the critic
of belles-lettres would insist. “If you
really loved me you’d want every one to know
it.”
“I do,” she protested; “I want to
stand on the street corner like a sandwich man, informing
all the passers-by.”
“Then tell me all the reasons why you’re
going to marry me in June.”
“Well, because you’re so clean. You’re
sort of blowy clean, like I am. There’s
two sorts, you know. One’s like Dick:
he’s clean like polished pans. You and
I are clean like streams and winds. I can tell
whenever I see a person whether he is clean, and if
so, which kind of clean he is.”
“We’re twins.”
Ecstatic thought!
“Mother says”—she hesitated
uncertainly—“mother says that two
souls are sometimes created together and—and
in love before they’re born.”
Bilphism gained its easiest convert.... After
a while he lifted up his head and laughed soundlessly
toward the ceiling. When his eyes came back to
her he saw that she was angry.
