was bulging out, that blue-eyed vision of careless girlhood!  Happily he had been so seated that he could study her without seeming to do so.  The line of her ankle where the firelight danced upon it put Coles Phillips to shame, he averred.  Extraordinary, how these creatures are made to torment us with their intolerable comeliness!  Against the background of dusky bindings her head shone with a soft haze of gold.  Her face, that had an air of naive and provoking independence, made him angry with its unnecessary surplus of enchantment.  An unaccountable gust of rage drove him rapidly along the frozen street.  “Damn it,” he cried, “what right has any girl to be as pretty as that?  Why—­why, I’d like to beat her!” he muttered, amazed at himself.  “What the devil right has a girl got to look so innocently adorable?”

It would be unseemly to follow poor Aubrey in his vacillations of rage and worship as he thrashed along Wordsworth Avenue, hearing and seeing no more than was necessary for the preservation of his life at street crossings.  Half-smoked cigarette stubs glowed in his wake;[2] his burly bosom echoed with incoherent oratory.  In the darker stretches of Fulton Street that lead up to the Brooklyn Bridge he fiercely exclaimed:  “By God, it’s not such a bad world.”  As he ascended the slope of that vast airy span, a black midget against a froth of stars, he was gravely planning such vehemence of exploit in the advertising profession as would make it seem less absurd to approach the President of the Daintybits Corporation with a question for which no progenitor of loveliness is ever quite prepared.

[2] Note while proofreading:  Surely this phrase was unconsciously lifted from R. L. S. But where does the original occur?  C. D. M.

In the exact centre of the bridge something diluted his mood; he halted, leaning against the railing, to consider the splendour of the scene.  The hour was late—­moving on toward midnight—­ but in the tall black precipices of Manhattan scattered lights gleamed, in an odd, irregular pattern like the sparse punctures on the raffle-board—­“take a chance on a Milk-Fed Turkey”—­the East Indian elevator-boy presents to apartment-house tenants about Hallowe’en.  A fume of golden light eddied over uptown merriment:  he could see the ruby beacon on the Metropolitan Tower signal three quarters.  Underneath the airy decking of the bridge a tug went puffing by, her port and starboard lamps trailing red and green threads over the tideway.  Some great argosy of the Staten Island fleet swept serenely down to St. George, past Liberty in her soft robe of light, carrying theatred commuters, dazed with weariness and blinking at the raw fury of the electric bulbs.  Overhead the night was a superb arch of clear frost, sifted with stars.  Blue sparks crackled stickily along the trolley wires as the cars groaned over the bridge.