“Her van has vanished, much to her regret,” Florence laughed. “We’ll have the chicken all the same.”
“And about this story of the crystal ball,” Sandy asked as they prepared to leave the cafeteria. “Shall I run that tomorrow?”
“Oh, no!” Florence exclaimed in alarm. “Not yet. I want to dig deeply into that. I—I’m hoping I may find something truly magical there.”
“Well, don’t hope too much!” Sandy dashed away to make one more “dead-line.”
That had been an exciting day for the little French girl. After she had crept beneath the covers in her studio chamber at ten o’clock that night, she could not sleep. When she closed her eyes she saw a thousand faces. Old, wrinkled faces, pinched young faces and the half greedy, half hopeless faces of the middle-aged. All that Maxwell Street had been as she danced so madly for the prize that meant so little to her and so much to another.
“Life,” she whispered to herself, “is so very queer! Why must we always be thinking of others? Life should not be like that. We should be free to seek happiness for ourselves alone. Happiness! Happiness!” she repeated the word softly. “Why should not happiness be our only aim in life? To sing like the nightingale, to dart about like a humming-bird, to dance wild and free like the fairies. Ah, this should be life!”
Still she could not sleep. It was often so. It was as if life were too thrilling, too joyous and charming to be spent in senseless sleep.
Slipping from her bed, she drew on heavy skating socks and slippers, wrapped herself in a heavy woolen dressing gown; then slipping silently out of her room, felt about in the half darkness of the studio until she found the rounds of an iron ladder. Then she began to climb. She had not climbed far when she came to a small trap door. This she lifted. Having taken two more steps up, she paused to stare about her. Her gaze swept the surface of a broad flat roof, their roof.
“Twelve o’clock, and all’s well,” she whispered with a low laugh. The roof was silent as a tomb. She stepped out upon the roof, then allowed the trap door to drop without a sound into its place. She was now at the top of her own little world.
And what a world on such a night! Above her, like blue diamonds, the stars shone. Hanging low over the distant dark waters of the lake, the moon lay at the end of a path of gold.