Taste of veal with tomato and peppers, savor of frizzled olive oil, little seeds mashed between the front teeth into a prickly faint aroma, and wine, the cool curve of the glass against my lips, the tang of it like rainy sunsets. I could sit here imagining it and never drink, imagining Nan's lips... He picked up the glass and drank off the goldcolored wine at a gulp so that it choked him. He coughed and spluttered into his napkin. "I follow you there, if you include the idea of material pleasures being purged of their grossness, by reason, fitness, as Nan says. So made the raw material of beauty," Fanshaw was saying. Wenny coughed and spluttered into his napkin. "Drink a little water," Fanshaw added. "More Orvieto, you mean," said Wenny hoarsely. "By the way, is Orvieto in Tuscany?" "No, in Umbria, I think; that's where the great Signorelli frescos of the last judgment are, that strange dry hideously violent piece of macabre." "Gee, I'd like to see them." "You will some day." "If I don't see the actual subject first ... No Burton Holmes is as far as I'll ever get towards Umbria." "Why, lots of people work their way over." "You haven't seen me do it yet, have you? That's what I was saying. The world is full of people doing every conceivable sort of thing. The streets are full of them. You can see the things in their eyes." "Well, why not you?" said Nan breathlessly. "Before I came to college I spent my time dreaming, and now I spend it gabbling about my dreams that have died and begun to stink. Why the only genuine thing I ever did in my life was get drunk, and I haven't done that often." Wenny drank down his wine again. His hair was wet. His heart pounded with exultation in the look of wincing pain on Nan's face. "Suppose we start home," Nan said. "I have a little headache tonight." Out in the streets the snowflakes danced dazzlingly, ruddy and green, and shivered gold through flaws and cones and crystals of light from windows and arclights. Faces bloomed and faded through a jumbled luminous mist, white as plaster casts, red as raw steak, yellow and warted like summer squashes, smooth and expressionless like cantaloupes. Occasionally a door yawned black and real in the spinning flicker of the snow and the lights, or a wall seemed to bulge to splitting with its denseness. In the shelter of the subway entrance they stood hesitating a moment. "Why don't you both come out to my place?" said Nan in a pleading voice. "We'll make some chocolate or something." "No, I want to think." "But you can think there all you want... And it's such a miserable night." "I'm going to Brookline to Mother's, anyway; I'll go as far as your door," said Fanshaw. "You can amuse yourselves picking my character to pieces all the way out," said Wenny boisterously. They none of them laughed. "Well, then, good night."