Books › Blue Book v018 n04 [1914-02], 1914 › scan 69
Scan 69
Blue Book v018 n04 [1914-02], 1914
26 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1'cello beneath the lilting melody wailed by the violins.
3Ferguson reached hastily toward the electric light. If he was going to sniffle like a homesick schoolboy because he was lonely and forgotten on New Year's eve, he preferred not to witness the emotional exhibition in an unsympathetic chiffonier glass opposite. Instead, he pulled himself together with a determined shrug and walked to the window.
5Great Scot! This was no snowstorm; it was a blizzard! Out beyond the corner in the open square the wind tore by at sixty miles an hour. In the street just below, the paving stones were swept bare and clean, while back in basement areas and dooryards drifts were piling man-high. Shimmering blue haloes around the arc lights ringed weird and ghostly circles in the swirl of whiteness. A trolley car stopped at the crossing and then whizzed on downtown, the impatient clang of its gong an imperious defiance of the obstructing element.
7The uproarious din of the Broadway carnival could not penetrate this far uptown neighborhood, but occasionally the muffled bellow of a tin trumpet came through the thickened air, and every car and limousine fighting a way downtown was packed with enthusiastic would-be revelers. But what a night, even on gaudily lighted, snow-ploughed Broadway! What a New Year's eve! A bit of great luck, indeed, that the Montclair friends had telephoned they would not risk bringing the car over to town in such a storm. What a fool stunt, anyway, to celebrate Happy New Year with a bawling bunch of bibblers! Happy New Year indeed!
9High up in an apartment house diagonally opposite, two lighted windows were within Ferguson's range of vision; and Ferguson gazed across the shifting white veil of snow and through the barrier of those drawn window shades. What he saw was this: a green-carpeted room, a book-laden table flanked by low chairs under the glow of a lamp, an open piano piled with music, a many-cushioned couch, the red gleam of firelight calling out gay response from copper tea-kettle and chafing dish and trifles of brass scattered over a writing desk.
11A year ago—ye gods! what possessed him to-night to indulge himself in these sickly-sentimental reminiscences? Broken friendships were not things to spoil a man's whole life.
13What if he had been exacting?—She had been unreasonable, heaven knew! What if he had overestimated his right to dictate? She knew—she must have known that a definite understanding between them hovered on the brink of every golden moment. . . .
15It was at this particular moment that one of the shades veiling the windows diagonally opposite was raised and a woman peered anxiously out into the storm.
17Against the glow of lamp and firelight she looked to be a slip of a thing, with soft hair coiled high on a head rather proudly held. Ferguson could not see more than this shadowy silhouette, but well he knew the eyes of her—brown and tender. Well he knew the smile of her—gay for welcome. What a pal she was! Grave and sweet for sympathy—what a friend she was!
19What did pride matter? What did the right or wrong of the thing matter? What did anything matter? He wanted her—her! He wanted to see her eyes laugh again, like the laughing of a little brook over brown pebbles. He wanted the dainty, fresh fragrance of her hair in his face again, to intoxicate his senses. He wanted the soft sweetness of her in his arms. He wanted—
21Another car came clanging to a stop at the crossing, and a rubber-coated messenger boy climbed off and ploughed through the drifts to the entrance of an apartment house diagonally across the way, a long white pasteboard box gripped beneath his arm.
23She had vanished from the window but she had neglected to draw the shade, and presently Ferguson saw her advancing across the lamp-lighted room with a long white pasteboard box in her arms.
25American Beauties! Just like Jane-way's hulking clumsiness to send her American Beauties—flaunting things, whose exaggerated stems bespoke their
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