“Why do you laugh?” she said, waving her hand to Myrtle Popper, who was on guard at Joey Shine’s window.
“It was an honest laugh,” he said evasively.
The naturalness and the directness of her nature, the simple force of her emotions, unfettered by self-consciousness, in contrast with the worldliness in which he had moved, overcame him, as the clear breath of the open fields sometimes is too overpowering to those who seek it in city weariness.
And so, arm in arm, defiant of the world, they returned to the Arcade where, only a few hours before, he had come in despair and surrender, seeing the end of all things. For a moment, the whole pack of cringing doubts—of himself, of her, of the waking realism of the morrow, of distrust for the enduring quality of dramatic moments—doubts that often caused him to laugh aloud in bitterness, came howling around him. Were the tingling sensations of awaking curiosity, the delight in singing sounds and thronging life, the overwhelming passion to be, to know himself still alive, but the mirage of a fool’s paradise? She felt the inner trouble in him, and drew her arm closer to his, saying, with already a beginning of proprietorship:
“What are you mumbling to yourself like that?”
“Call it a prayer,” he said, half in earnest, half in jest.
XXVI
“And when in the grave
Her laddie they laid,
Her heart then broke,
And she fervently prayed:
O God in Heaven,
Let me go, too,
And be wi’ my laddie—so guid and true!”