There was a knock at the door. Nan drew her breath in sharply and went to open. Wenny heard Fanshaw's voice in the hall.
"O I'm so glad to find you. I thought it'ld be just my luck to miss you both and spend a dull evening all alone. I have had the most detestable day."
"Let's walk in town to supper," said Nan in a hurried, throaty voice.
Walking down a broad street towards town, they had the dome of the Christian Science Church ahead of them swelled with purple against a tremendous scarletflaring sky across which grimy green clouds scudded on gusts of rising wind. Sharp flaws of cold were clotting the mist and chilling all reminiscence of thaw and spring out of the air. Footsteps rang shrill and fast on the pavements and were lost in the clang of streetcars and whirr of motors grinding slowly when they came out on Massachusetts Avenue. Overhead, above the bright shine of shop windows through which faces drifted steadily, outline drifting into outline, like snowflakes past an arclight, the sky was a churning of dark green clouds fast blotting the clear, fiery afterglow. Wenny could hear himself talking to Fanshaw as they walked, but all the while he was intent on the people he passed; smooth, velvety-warm masks of young men and girls, wooden masks of men bleached by offices, crumpled masks of old women; under them all seemed to tremble something jellylike and eager, something half caught sight of in their eyes that had thrilled to the warm afternoon, that this sudden cold searching through the dusty concrete grooves of the city congealed to shuddering crystals of terror. He felt a sudden maudlin desire to climb on a hydrant and talk, to draw people in circle after circle about him and explain all the joy and agony he felt in words so simple that they would tear off their masks and tell their lives too; it would be his face, his eyes, his mouth moulding words all about him when the masks were off. The picture brightened painfully in his mind.
"Look at all that yellow broom in the window," Fanshaw was saying. As they passed a flowershop they caught a momentary sweet gust of hothouses. "That's the real plantagenet, I think, that the Black Prince wore on his helmet. Strange to think of it this cold night in a Boston flowershop."
"Say it with flowers," Nan put in laughing.
"Exactly," said Fanshaw. "Yet why should there be that horrid rasp in the advertising phrase and the unction in 'langage des fleurs'? Do things seem beautiful only when they are unaccustomed?"
"Perhaps it's that not being customary and diurnal puts them in the proper light ... so that we can really see them," said Nan.
"I think it's just that we like to kid ourselves along. This may be a moment as important in the history of Boston as the time of lilies when Pico della Mirandola first rode into Florence, as you and Mr. Pater are so fond of telling us, Fanshaw," broke in Wenny. "But we don't know anything about it. We'd probably have gone grumbling and growling into town for dinner if we'd lived in Florence then, just like we do here, and complained what a dull town it was."
"But can't you imagine people of another caliber altogether from us?"