HEART OF THE CITY
SMASH it at last into a great, screeching crescendo that rent your eardrums like the crash of steel rails.
With strangely parched lips, the Woodland Girl stretched out her small brown hand to the fragile, flower-stemmed glass, and tasted for the first time in her life the sweety-sad, molten-gold magic of champagne. "Why, what is it? "she asked, with the wonder still wet on her lips. "Why, what is it?"
The Journalist raised his own glass with staler fingers, and stared for a second through narrow- ing eyes into the shimmering vintage. "What is it? "he repeated softly. "This particular brand? The Italians call it 'Lacryma; Christi.'! So even in our furies and our follies, in our cafes and ca rousals, in our love and all our laughter we drink you see the Tears of Christ. He reached out suddenly and covered the Girl s half- drained glass with a quivering hand. "Excuse me," he stammered. "Maybe our thirst is partly of the soul ; but 'Lacryma Christi' was never meant for little girls like you. Go back to your woods!"
Scuttle as it might, the precipitate, naked passion in his voice did not quite have time to cover itself with word-clothes. A little gasping breath es-
caped. And though the Girl s young life was as
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