Boston (Mass.) -- Fiction; Interpersonal relations -- Fiction
Fanshaw had marked the last paper in the test on Florentine sculpture.
He got up from his desk yawning. O Lord! he was thinking, I'll never be
able to look Donatello or the Ghiberti doors in the face again. He
leaned over, arranged the pencils in their tray, put the papers away in
the drawer, and slowly took off his tortoise-shell spectacles. My eyes
are smarting; I mustn't work any more tonight. The case closed on his
spectacles with a faint clack. Poor Wenny, what a rotten shame; but if
he would not learn tact, discretion, what on earth was there to do? So
idiotically childish. Fanshaw walked with long, leisurely stride into
his bathroom, where he hung his dressing gown on the back of the door.
He came back with yellowstriped pajamas under his arm and sat on the
edge of the bed to take off his shoes. Fearful how this business upsets
me, he muttered aloud. Much too fond of Wenny, his dark skin, his
extraordinary bright eyes. One ought to have more control over one's
emotions, senses. At grade school in Omaha, there had been that
curlyhaired boy, Bunny Jones. Walking home from school one day, they
took the roundabout way beyond the railroad yards. Must have been May,
for the locusts were out. Mother never could abide the smell of locusts,
insisted they gave her a headache. Bunny had suddenly put an arm round
his neck and kissed him and run off crying in a funny little voice,
"Gee, I'm skeered." Curious the way streaks like that turn up in one.
Pico della Mirandola wouldn't have been afraid of such an impulse if it
had come to him. There were so many scandalmongers about this place. How
fearful anything like that would be. He wasn't free like Wenny. He had
his mother to take care of, lovely career to make. How bitterly silly
the idea was. He folded his trousers over the back of the chair. And it
was really Nan he cared for. Love, he thought; the word somehow rasped
in him. When he had put on his pajamas he stood in front of the dim
mirror a second rubbing his fingers through his short sandy hair.
Wonderful it would be to have yellow curls like Dürer in his portrait.
He turned out the light and got into bed. O, the window! He got up,
pushed the window up half way and retreated hastily before the blast of
cold air that stung his flesh under the loose pajamas. Comfortable, this
bed; better than the one I have at mother's place. He closed his eyes
and drew the covers up about his chin. Streets, he thought of, long
streets of blind windows, dark, cold under arclights, and himself and
Wenny and Nan walking arm in arm, hurrying from corner to corner. Can't
seem to find that street, and on to the next corner between endless rows
of blind windows converging in a perspective utterly black beyond the
cold lividness of arclights. Must have lost our way in these streets.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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