Later in the afternoon when he returned from the station with the
tickets he found her asleep on one of the beds, her arm curled about a
black object which he could not at first identify. Coming closer he
found it was one of his shoes, not a particularly new one, nor clean
one, but her face, tear-stained, was pressed against it, and he
understood her ancient and most honorable message. There was almost
ecstasy in waking her and seeing her smile at him, shy but well aware of
her own nicety of imagination.
With no appraisal of the worth or dross of these two things, it seemed
to Anthony that they lay somewhere near the heart of love.
THE GRAY HOUSE
It is in the twenties that the actual momentum of life begins to
slacken, and it is a simple soul indeed to whom as many things are
significant and meaningful at thirty as at ten years before. At thirty
an organ-grinder is a more or less moth-eaten man who grinds an
organ--and once he was an organ-grinder! The unmistakable stigma of
humanity touches all those impersonal and beautiful things that only
youth ever grasps in their impersonal glory. A brilliant ball, gay with
light romantic laughter, wears through its own silks and satins to show
the bare framework of a man-made thing--oh, that eternal hand!--a play,
most tragic and most divine, becomes merely a succession of speeches,
sweated over by the eternal plagiarist in the clammy hours and acted by
men subject to cramps, cowardice, and manly sentiment.
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