They dined at Rector’s, and after dinner they walked down Broadway into Madison Square, where upon this mild October night the Metropolitan Tower, that best of all the Gargantuan baby’s toys, seemed to challenge the indifferent moon. They wandered up Madison Avenue, which was dark after the winking sky-signs of Broadway and with its not very tall houses held a thought of London in the darkness. But when Sylvia turned to look back it was no longer London, for she could see the great, illuminated hands and numerals of the clock in the Metropolitan flashing from white to red for the hour. This clock without a dial-plate was the quietest of the Gargantuan baby’s toys, for it did not strike; one was conscious of the almost pathetic protest against all those other damnably noisy toys: one felt he might become so enamoured of its pretty silence that to provide himself with a new diversion he might take to doubling the hours to keep pace with the rapidity of the life with which he played.
“It’s almost as if we were walking up Haverstock Hill again,” said Arthur.
“And we’re grown up now,” Sylvia murmured. “Oh, dreadfully grown up, really!”
They walked on for a while in silence. It was impossible to keep back the temptation to cheat time by leaping over the gulf of years and being what they were when last they walked along together like this. Sylvia kept looking over her shoulder at the bland clock hanging in the sky behind them; at this distance the fabric of the tower had melted into the night and was no longer visible, which gave to the clock a strange significance and made it a simulacrum of time itself.
“You haven’t changed a bit,” she said.
“Do you remember when you told me I looked like a cow? It was after”—he breathed perceptibly faster—“after I kissed you.”
She would not ascribe his remembering what she had called him to an imperfectly healed scar of vanity, but with kindlier thoughts turned it to a memento of his affection for her. After all, she had loved him then; it had been a girl’s love, but did there ever come with age a better love than that first flushed gathering of youth’s opening flowers?
“Sylvia, I’ve thought about you ever since. When you drove me away from Colonial Terrace I felt like killing myself. Surely we haven’t met again for nothing.”
“Is it nothing unless I love you?” she asked, fiercely, striving to turn the words into weapons to pierce the recesses of his thoughts and blunt themselves against a true heart.
“Ah no, I won’t say that,” he cried. “Besides, I haven’t the right to talk about love. You’ve been—Sylvia, I can’t tell you what you’ve been to me since I met you again.”