More
than Stephen, perhaps, she had faced life; but she had not accepted it
without rebellion. She had learned from disappointment to see things as
they are; but deep in her heart some unspent fire of romance, some
imprisoned esthetic impulse, sought continually to gild and enrich the
experience of the moment. And this girl, so young, so ingenuous, so
gallant and so appealing, stood in Corinna's mind for the poetic
wildness of her spirit, for all that she had seen in a vision and had
missed in reality.
When the car reached the Square, it turned sharply north. Sometimes it
passed through lighted spaces and sometimes through pools of darkness;
and as it went on rapidly, it seemed to Corinna that it was the one
solid fact in a night that she imagined. Patty was very still; but
Corinna felt the warm clasp of her hand, and heard her soft breathing,
which became a part of the muffled undercurrent of the sleeping city. In
all those closely packed houses, where the obscurity was broken here and
there by a lighted window, other human beings were breathing, sleeping,
dreaming, like Patty and herself, of some impractical and visionary
to-morrow.
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