"I don't want one. I want a kitty." She went thoroughly and with great
enthusiasm into the history, habits, and tastes of a cat she had once
possessed. Anthony considered that it must have been a horrible
character with neither personal magnetism nor a loyal heart.
Later they slept, to wake an hour before dawn with the gray house
dancing in phantom glory before their dazzled eyes.
THE SOUL OF GLORIA
For that autumn the gray house welcomed them with a rush of sentiment
that falsified its cynical old age. True, there were the laundry-bags,
there was Gloria's appetite, there was Anthony's tendency to brood and
his imaginative "nervousness," but there were intervals also of an
unhoped-for serenity. Close together on the porch they would wait for
the moon to stream across the silver acres of farmland, jump a thick
wood and tumble waves of radiance at their feet. In such a moonlight
Gloria's face was of a pervading, reminiscent white, and with a modicum
of effort they would slip off the blinders of custom and each would find
in the other almost the quintessential romance of the vanished June.
One night while her head lay upon his heart and their cigarettes glowed
in swerving buttons of light through the dome of darkness over the bed,
she spoke for the first time and fragmentarily of the men who had hung
for brief moments on her beauty.
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