"I believe you almost kissed me back there, did you not Professor?"
"So, it's 'Professor' again, is it?" He smiled the faintest of smiles and looked away down the street. "Miss Haviland, you did not ask to be kissed—back there." She turned quickly in front of him to catch his gaze, so that he had to stop. "Not in so many words," he added, "I mean—you hesitated as much as I."
"Fancy that," she replied with a laugh, and began walking again, swinging her legs gaily, letting her skirt billow.
He touched her hand, draped over his forearm, and she felt the warmth of his fingers through her glove. They walked on beneath bare branches and quietly falling snow. It seemed far too warm for snow—tropical almost, as if the gaslights were warming the whole scene—the whole world. Winter was about to melt—the sun might even rise the next instant and spring would return in a blaze of gold and green with soft rain, the scent of flowers.
"In future, perhaps I _shall_ ask, Professor." She leaned to grip his arm more tightly and whispered. "Perhaps I shall."
THE HUNGARIAN LIGHTBULB
When the symphony orchestra collapsed in ruin after years spent floating, half-dead near bankruptcy, all the musicians were thrown out of work. At that time nearly everyone was out of work anyway—many of them discovered soup-kitchens and soon found employment at menial tasks. A few—the lucky or the talented, but mostly those with both luck and talent—found other musical work well below stevedore's wages.
Jurgen had tremendous talent but no luck, yet he could not imagine any other life than being a violist. He would not look for non-musical work—everything was unsuitable, and certainly unattractive. He took the little savings he had and went West thinking to find a place less crowded with hungry musicians. Rather than spend his money on transportation he settled on a romantic adventure: he made friends around the freight yards and rode the rails west until he arrived on the outskirts of a comfortably large city with a clean look—and there he decided to make his home. The city was familiar to him, as a professional musician: it boasted a fine orchestra whose conductor, one Laurence Lamonte, frequently found shockingly intimate details of his flamboyant life splashed across the pages of the tabloids.