Читать книгу A Book About Myself онлайн

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Once my work was done of an afternoon, I loitered over many things waiting for evening to come, when I should see Alice again. Usually I read or visited a gallery or some park. Alice was intensely sweet to me. Her eyes were so soft, so liquid, so unprotesting and so unresenting. She was usually gay, with at times a suggestion of hidden melancholy. At night, in that great world of life which is the business heart of Chicago I used to wait for her, and together, once we had found each other in the crowds, we would make our way to the great railway station at the end of Dearborn Street, where a tall clock-tower held a single yellow clock-face. If it chanced to be Tuesday or Thursday I would go home with her. On other nights she would sometimes stay down to dine with me at some inexpensive place.

I never knew until toward the end of the following summer, when things were breaking up for me in Chicago and seemingly greater opportunities were calling me elsewhere, that during all this time she had really never relinquished her relationship with my predecessor, fearing my instability perhaps. By what necessary lies and innocent subterfuges she had held him against the time when I might not care for her any more I know not. The thing has poignance now. Was she unfaithful? I do not think so. At any rate she was tender, clinging and in need of true affection. She would take my hand and hold it under her arm or against her heart and talk of the little things of the day: the strutting customers and managers, the condescending women of social pretensions, the other girls, who sometimes spied upon or traitorously betrayed each other. Usually her stories were of amusing things, for she had no heart for bitter contention. There was a note of melancholy running all through her relationship with me, however, for I think she saw the unrest and uncertainty of my point of view. Already my mind’s eye was scanning a farther horizon, in which neither she nor any other woman had a vital part. Fame, applause, power, possibly, these were luring me. Once she said to me, her eyes looking longingly into mine: