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Cecilia—(Addressing her future self) Oh, yes! Really, coming out is such a farce nowadays, y’know. We really play around so much before we are seventeen, that it’s positive anticlimax. (Shaking hands with a visionary middle-aged man of the world) Yes, I b’lieve I’ve heard m’ sister speak of you. Have a puff. They’re very good. They’re Coronas. You don’t smoke? What a pity.
She crosses to the desk and picks up the flask. From downstairs the rain of clapping between encores rises. She raises the flask, uncorks it, smells it, tastes a little, and then drinks about the equivalent of two cocktails. She replaces the flask, makes a wry face and, as the music starts again, fox-trots slowly around the room, waving the cigarette with intense seriousness, and watching herself in the long mirror.
Curtain
— ◆ —
The Spire and the Gargoyle.
Nassau Literary Magazine (February 1917)
I.
The night mist fell. From beyond the moon it rolled, clustered about the spires and towers, and then settled below them so that the dreaming peaks seemed still in lofty aspiration toward the stars. Figures that dotted the daytime like ants now brushed along as ghosts in and out of the night. Even the buildings seemed infinitely more mysterious as they loomed suddenly out of the darkness, outlined each by a hundred faint squares of yellow light. Indefinitely from somewhere a bell boomed the quarter hour and one of the squares of light in an east campus recitation hall was blotted out for an instant as a figure emerged. It paused and resolved itself into a boy who stretched his arms wearily and, advancing, threw himself down full length on the damp grass by the sun-dial. The cool bathed his eyes and helped to force away the tiresome picture of what he had just left, a picture that, in the two strenuous weeks of examinations now just over, had become indelibly impressed upon his memory—a room with the air fairly vibrating with nervous tension, silent with the presence of twenty boys working desperately against time, searching every corner of tired brains for words and figures which seemed forever lost. The boy out on the grass opened his eyes and looked back at the three pale blurs which marked the windows of the examination room. Again he heard: