IX + 

George Farr, from the outer darkness, glowered at her, watching her slim body cut by a masculine arm, watching her head beside another head, seeing her limbs beneath her silver dress anticipating her partner’s limbs, seeing the luminous plane of her arm across his black shoulders and her fan drooping from her arched wrist like a willow at evening. He heard the rhythmic troubling obscenities of saxophones, he saw vague shapes in the darkness and he smelled the earth and things growing in it. A couple passed them and a girl said, “Hello, George. Coming in?” “No,” he told her, wallowing in all the passionate despair of spring and youth and jealousy, getting of them an exquisite bliss. + 

His friend beside him, a soda-clerk, spat his cigarette. “Let’s have another drink.” + 

The bottle was a combination of alcohol and sweet syrup purloined from the drugstore. It was temporarily hot to the throat, but this passed away leaving in its place a sweet, inner fire, a courage. + 

“To hell with them,” he said. + 

“You ain’t going in, are you?” his friend asked. They had another drink. The music beat on among youthful leaves, into the darkness, beneath the gold and mute cacophony of stars. The light from the veranda mounting was lost, the house loomed huge against the sky: a rock against which waves of trees broke, and breaking were forever arrested; and stars were golden unicorns neighing unheard through blue meadows, spurning them with hooves sharp and scintillant as ice. The sky, so remote, so sad, spurned by the unicorns of gold, that, neighing soundlessly from dusk to dawn, had seen them, had seen her⁠—her taut body prone and naked as a narrow pool sweetly dividing: two silver streams from a single source.⁠ ⁠… + 

“I’m not going in,” he answered, moving away. They crossed the lawn and in the shadow of a crepe-myrtle one with a sound of breath became two. They walked quickly on, averting their eyes. + 

“Hell, no,” he repeated, “I’m not going in.” + 