ent on Riverside Drive you
could see it grow gentle, fade from a strong heat of azure through gray
gauze into darkness, thick-soft as a sable's fur at first, then uneasily
patterned all at once with idle leopard-spottings and strokes of light.
The lights fell into the river and dissolved, the dark wash took them
and carried them into streaks of lesser, more fluid light. Even so, if
there could have been country silence for five minutes at a time, the
running river, the hills so disturbed with light beyond, might have worn
some aspect of peace. But even in the high bird's nest of the apartment
there was no real silence, only a pretending at silence, like the forced
quiet of a child told to keep still in a corner--the two people dining
together could talk in whispers, if they wanted, and still be heard,
but always at the back of the brain of either ran a thin pulsation of
mumbling sound like the buzz of a kettle-drum softly struck in a passage
of music where the orchestra talks full-voiced--the night sound of the
city, breathing and moving and saying words.

They must have been married rather contentedly for quite a while now,
they said so little of importance at dinner and yet seemed so quietly
pleased at having dinner together and so neat at understanding half
sentences without asking explanations. That would have been the first
conclusion of anybody who had been able to take out a wall and watch
their doll-house unobserved. Besides, though the short, decided man with
the greyish hair must be fifty at least, the woman who stood his own
height when she rose from the table was too slimly mature for anything
but the thirties. Not a highly original New York couple by any means--a
prospering banker or president of a Consolidated Toothpick Company with
a beautiful wife, American matron-without-children model, except for her
chin which was less dimpled than cleft with decisiveness and the wholly
original lustre of her hair, a buried lustre like the shine of "Murray's
red gold" in a Border ballad. A wife rather less society-stricken than
the run of such wives since she obviously preferred hot August in a New
York apartment with her husband's company to beach-picnics at Greenwich
or Southampton without it. Still the apartment, though compact as an
army mess-kit, was perfectly furnished and the maid who had served
the cool little dinner an efficient effacedness of the race that
housekeepers with large families and little money ass