Collis, unaware that he was without a wedding garment, heralded his arrival with: “I reckon I’m late – the beyed has flown.
As the conversation continued in stilted commas, Anthony wondered that to him and Bloeckman both this girl had once been the most stimulating, the most tonic personality they had ever known – and now the three sat like overoiled machines, without conflict, without fear, without elation, heavily enamelled little figures secure beyond enjoyment in a world where death and war, dull emotion and noble savagery were covering a continent with the smoke of terror. In.
It’s like lifting off in an airplane: you’re on the ground, on the ground, on the ground... and then you’re up, riding on a magical cushion of air and prince of all you survey. That makes me happy, because it’s what I was made to do.
Then it was all true. I saw the skins of tigers flaming in his palace on the Grand Canal; I saw him opening a chest of rubies to ease, with their crimson-lighted depths, the gnawings of his broken heart.
Softly the two names lingered on the air, died away more slowly than other words, other names, slower than music in the mind.
Her hair, full of a heavenly glamour, was gay against the winter color of the room.
There’s a difference somewhere.” Being a supreme egotist Ardita frequently.
He was consumed with wonder by her presence.
I could settle down if women were different,” he said. “If I didn’t understand so much about them, if women didn’t spoil you for other women, if they had only a little pride. If I could go to sleep for a while and wake up into a home that was really mine – why, that’s what I’m made for, Paula, that’s what women have seen in me and liked in me. It’s only that I can’t get through the preliminaries any more.
Nothing had ever felt so young as her lips.
Into a dozen minds entered a quick suspicion, a rumour of scandal. Could it be that behind the scenes with this couple, apparently so in love, lurked some curious antipathy? Why else this streak of fire across such a cloudless heaven?
But I didn’t call to him, for he gave a sudden intimation that he was content to be alone – he stretched out his arms toward the dark water in a curious way, and, far as I was from him, I could have sworn he was trembling. Involuntarily I glanced seaward – and distinguished nothing except a single green light, minute and far way, that might have been the end of a dock. When I looked once more for Gatsby he had vanished, and I was alone again in the unquiet darkness.
Again the word was a prayer, incense offered up to a high God through this new and unfathomable darkness.
Isabelle had walked with an artificial gait at nine and a half, and when her eyes, wide and starry, proclaimed the ingenue most. Amory was proportionately less deceived. He waited for the mask to drop off, but at the same time he did not question her right to wear it.
He went three hundred yards up the slope to the other hotel, he engaged a room, and found himself washing without a memory of the intervening ten minutes, only a sort of drunken flush pierced with voices, unimportant voices that did not know how much he was loved.
Anyhow, he gives large parties,” said Jordan, changing the subject with an urbane distaste for the concrete. “And I like large parties. They’re so intimate. At small parties there isn’t any privacy.
Back out,’ he suggested after a moment. ‘Put her in reverse.’ ‘But the WHEEL’S off!’ He hesitated. ‘No harm in trying,’ he said.
He sometimes looked back with awe at the carnivals of affection he had given, as a general might gaze upon a massacre he had ordered to satisfy an impersonal blood lust.
The thin tunes, holding lost times and future hopes in liaison, twisted upon the Valais night.
Then Nicole. Rosemary saw her suddenly in a new way and found her one of the most beautiful people she had ever known. Her face, the face of a saint, a viking Madonna, shone through the faint motes that snowed across the candlelight, drew down its flush from the wine-colored lanterns in the pine. She was still as still.