Her tears came faster, until she could scarcely see the page. She was
crying, she told herself, because she could remember only the rain and
the wet flowers in the yard and the smell of the damp grass.
... After a moment she found a pencil and holding it unsteadily drew
three parallel lines beneath the last entry. Then she printed FINIS in
large capitals, put the book back in the drawer, and crept into bed.
BREATH OF THE CAVE
Back in his apartment after the bridal dinner, Anthony snapped out his
lights and, feeling impersonal and fragile as a piece of china waiting
on a serving table, got into bed. It was a warm night--a sheet was
enough for comfort--and through his wide-open windows came sound,
evanescent and summery, alive with remote anticipation. He was thinking
that the young years behind him, hollow and colorful, had been lived in
facile and vacillating cynicism upon the recorded emotions of men long
dust. And there was something beyond that; he knew now. There was the
union of his soul with Gloria's, whose radiant fire and freshness was
the living material of which the dead beauty of books was made.
From the night into his high-walled room there came, persistently, that
evanescent and dissolving sound--something the city was tossing up and
calling back again, like a child playing with a ball.
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