A Young Man's Heart by Cornell Woolrich Page A

little, bestowing so much. In through the window came a breeze too warm to stir anything, making itself evident only by means of the slight sweet odor of lemon-blossom it carried. Outside on distant roofs fragments of glass imbedded in mortar sparkled intermittently in the sun, out of all proportion to their size and relevancy.
    It was momentary, it was an illusion, it was too complete to last. Though it were to repeat itself identically a day following, that following day would necessarily be less perfect, for perfection cannot be halved. Even if it were only the novelty that was to be lost, with the novelty would go some of the inner substance. They may have realized this without quite understanding. Eleanor, in fact, holding her hands to her cheeks, stopped to say, “I can’t quite believe in it, it’s all so new to me yet.” But doubt foundered without their even recognizing it as such.
    Hours later, in the depths of the sapphire evening they appeared in the doorway together, groomed in their dinner clothes, and shutting out the light of the corridor and the downstairs music, went to the window and stood looking out again. The sky was a mosaic of stars. Tremulous with satisfaction at everything they saw about them in the world, they clung together and stroked one another’s faces.
    “We’ll be so happy here,” she said.
    “Yes, the setting is complete,” Blair assented, “the rest depends on ourselves.”
    Again that lode-star, as in his mother’s time, seeming to hang suspended over their heads: happiness, happiness. . .
     
    2
     
    They had gone downstairs and were getting into a carriage. Blair wanted to see if his father was still in the city. They had slighted the music that was still going on in the palm-banked patio, played much less admirably than in New York, Eleanor thought. They didn’t know anyone yet, and Eleanor was tired of dancing only with her husband. A horse-drawn carriage open to the night was a novelty, too.
    He lowered the little seat opposite and she put her feet upon it. Original Perugias had probably never touched it before now. “That’s rather fast for here,” Blair said.
    “Will they stare much?” She continued to be delighted with everything. “Look. A gold tooth. What does that say?”
    “Painless extractions,” he translated.
    “Of course,” she murmured, crestfallen.
    “Drive us through the city,” Blair told the coachman, “and then in an hour to the street Bruselas.”
    As they entered the midtown section the streets became better lighted yet narrower, more crowded yet more unkempt. At times the second-story balconies overhead almost met above the roadway.
    “It would have been risking your dress to go through here in the old days. They used to throw things out,” Blair told her.
    “What things?” she wanted to know.
    “Oh, never mind. I think I know,” he said presently.
    At once she was all animation again. “Look. A restaurant. And people drinking coffee on the sidewalk.”
    She had pointed with her entire arm, and he smiled.
    “Their music,” she commented learnedly, “isn’t played as well for dancing as ours is, but it seems to have more romance to it, more—”
    “That was Poor Butterfly you heard back there,” he interrupted hastily, to protect her feelings as best he could.
    “I know that,” she answered almost at once, “what I meant was, they give it more soul, they do something to it—”
    At the intersection of two notably narrow streets their progress was blocked. The coachman drew rein and rising in his seat, unburdened himself of a torrent of speech, in which Blair recognized a good many words he had learned in his own boyhood here. However, an old woman, taking advantage of the halt they had made, approached the side of the carriage and thrust a handful of printed papers toward them, whining insinuatingly. Blair arbitrarily waved her away.
    “What does she want?” Eleanor asked.
    “She’s selling lottery