"Be sure and put
ice in it," she said with insistence; "it isn't cold enough the way it
comes from the faucet."
Looking through the frail curtains she could see the rounded moon over
the roofs and beyond it on the sky the yellow glow from Times
Square--and watching the two incongruous lights, her mind worked over an
emotion, or rather an interwoven complex of emotions, that had occupied
it through the day, and the day before that and back to the last time
when she could remember having thought clearly and consecutively about
anything--which must have been while Anthony was in the army.
She would be twenty-nine in February. The month assumed an ominous and
inescapable significance--making her wonder, through these nebulous
half-fevered hours whether after all she had not wasted her faintly
tired beauty, whether there was such a thing as use for any quality
bounded by a harsh and inevitable mortality.
Years before, when she was twenty-one, she had written in her diary:
"Beauty is only to be admired, only to be loved-to be harvested
carefully and then flung at a chosen lover like a gift of roses. It
seems to me, so far as I can judge clearly at all, that my beauty should
be used like that.
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