Ahead of them too goes Victory, over fear, over doubt, over littleness, her
gold shoes ring like the noise of a sparkling sword, her steps are
swift. They stand for an instant, hands locked, looking back at the long
roller-coaster swoop of the Avenue, listening to the roll of tired wheels,
the faint horns, the loud horns. They know each other now--their hands grip
tighter--in the wandering instant the whole background of streets and tall
buildings passes like breath from a mirror--for the instant without breath
or clamor, they exist together, one being, and the being has neither flesh
to use the senses too clumsily, nor human thoughts to rust at the will, but
lives with the strength of a thunder and the heedlessness of a wave in a
wide and bright eternity of the unspoken.

"All the same," says Nancy, when the moment passes, lifting a shoe with the
concern of a kitten that has just discovered a thorn in its paw, "New York
pavements are certainly _hard_ on loving feet."




VII

So the picture came. And other pictures like it. And since the living that
had made them was past for a little they were both fainter and in a measure
brighter with more elfin colors than even that living had been which had
made them glow at first. White memory had taken them into her long house of
silence where everything is cool with the silver of Spring rain on leaves,
she had washed from them the human pettiness, the human separateness,
the human insufficiency to express the best that must come in any mortal
relationship that lasts longer than the hour. They were not better in