III
It was the theatre hour, the hour when the city flutters with solemn excitement like a bird fluttering in its bath. In that valley of light known as Broadway motor-cars and taxi-cabs hummed and throbbed and circled up to brightly-lighted foyers and were off again, like hungry trout in search of dusk's most glittering flies. Electric sky-signs flashed and shimmered in every colour of the rainbow, street crowds moved and gathered and moved again, lines of traffic pulsed intermittently along the side-streets, and over all hung that vague and misty aura of light which could crown even canyons of concrete with a wayward sense of beauty.
Kestner leaned forward in his taxi seat, drinking it in with hungrily unhappy eyes. They had already explored Fifth Avenue to the lonelier reaches of the upper city, and had swung sadly down through the wooded silences of Central Park, and had wandered by way of Seventy-second Street over to Riverside Drive, and had stopped to stare pensively up at Grant's Tomb, and had swung down Broadway again, bewildered by the changes which had crept over a city altering with every altering season. And now, made doubly melancholy by the hilarity which beleaguered them from every side, they were making their way back to Fifth Avenue and their belated dinner at Delmonico's.
98
