Read A Prologue To Love for Free Online Page B

fireplace opened, and a maid in black bombazine and a white frilled apron and cap entered the room, carrying a silver tray on which were a glass decanter filled with sherry and two small glasses of curious shape. She curtsied and then placed the tray on a table by the fire. “The mistress will be down in a moment, sir,” she murmured, and retreated from the room. The man lifted one of the glasses; it was as smooth as silk, and carved and heavy. He hesitated, then filled it with sherry. He stood and sipped. It reminded him of the mellow day and the mellow city. Ann had once said, “Boston is an autumn city, even in spring or summer. Like a topaz.” Another carriage rumbled past the house. The fire blazed stronger, and the scented air was pleasantly warm. No, thought the man, it isn’t like a topaz. It’s like this sherry, aged and matured. He opened a box on the table and took out a glac é chestnut and chewed it. Cynthia spared herself nothing. He frowned again.
     
    He began to wander slowly about the room. But he finally came back to the fire. He studied the sherry bottle; it was really a carafe, and he had never seen it before. But Cynthia was extravagant; she was always buying beautiful things, though she could not afford them. This was eighteenth-century, he was certain; it was of the most gleaming crystal with an overlay of silver tracery, vines, bunches of grapes, tendrils, with little faunlike faces peeping mischievously through the broad leaves. What delicacy, what tenderness, what marvelous care to expend on a bottle! Americans spent their time and effort on larger and worthier things. Disdainfully the man turned from the bottle, thinking of blackened and bellowing factories and foundries and turning wheels. These had significance; beauty had not. A steaming ship filled with products of industry had more meaning than statuettes and silken rugs, poetry and paintings, literature and art. Science was the new god, and deservedly so; it was not decadent and perfumed. It was money, and there was nothing in the world but money. There never had been, really, in spite of unmanly and posturing fools who quoted Keats and Shelley and delighted in texture and shape.
     
    He heard a soft gay trilling, and a door opened and a woman of thirty-one tripped gracefully into the room, lifting a pretty white hand in welcome. He never saw Cynthia without a catch in his gloomy heart. She was tall and slender, with a charming and youthful figure, like a girl’s; her dress of silvery satin had a tight bodice with little brilliant buttons undulating to her lissome waist; the front was smooth, daringly so, over her rounded hips and thighs, but the back puffed in an exaggerated bustle under which had been caught bunches of artificial violets. Her slippers were silver, pointed and traced with silver beads, and just appeared from under the flowing hem of her gown.
     
    Her face was an older face than the one in the portrait, but it had retained its girlish bloom, dazzling and fair, and her white throat was unlined and the pearls of the portrait glimmered on it. Her blond hair had been cut into wavy bangs on her clear forehead, lifted high on the back of her small head, then permitted to float almost to her shoulders in glossy and gleaming curls. Her lips were a bright pink glow, and her large gray eyes, full and luminous, shone through heavy golden lashes. Unlike her innocent portrait, she now had a saucy but extremely intelligent expression, full of liveliness and very sprightly.
     
    So Ann would look now, thought the man, if she had lived. He had forgotten, however, that Ann had always been more gentle than her sister. Ann, her father often had said, was a dove. But Cynthia was a shining bird.
     
    “Dear John,” she said now in a light but firmly pretty voice. She gave him her cool hand and smiled up at him. “How nice to see you again. Really. I was pleased to receive your letter. How well you look! Europe always renews you.”