Skyscraper by Faith Baldwin Page A

women of signal brilliance, and after a while they, too, had bored him.
    But little Lynn—there was something tremendously appealing about her; something fresh and radiant and untouched; something quaintly serious. But she could laugh, as a child laughs, with spontaneity, and her eyelids would crinkle and there was the unexpected fingerprint of a dimple in her cheek. Her left cheek. He hadn’t been as interested in a girl in months. Or was it years?
    What about this sex business anyway?—he thought vaguely—stupid or ugly or beautiful or mysterious, depending upon how you viewed it and when you viewed it. Before and after, like the advertisements. Indefinable, no matter how much print was wasted on it. You met someone—and that was that. Unreasonable, unreasoning.
    He must see her again. He would see her again.
    He must walk as delicately as Agag. There was no immediacy about it. When a man left the careless twenties and the casual thirties behind him he grew to know the value of making haste slowly, of savoring the moments, as a gourmet swirls the Napoleon brandy in the great crystal glass, aware of its perfume, and permits it to slide, drop by burning, smooth drop, over his palate. The girl in her dusky pink frock was like spring. And you grew to value spring, to cherish it, to take each day in your hands as if it were breakable and infinitely precious, and exact from it the last drop of heartbreaking fragrance, the last atom of star dust.
    He thought briefly of Sarah. Frowned. Sarah—Sarah might make trouble. But perhaps not. Still, he thought easily, he could handle Sarah.
    He made no plans, uttered no definitions. He was not a seducer of innocence. Seduction was abhorrent to him. He called it by another name, by several names. Every love affair into which he entered had its special glamor, its exceptional romance; he loved like a boy, like a mature man, and for the first time; and loved the more ardently because it would not last, because in the nature of things it could not endure. Knowing this, he said, each time, This is the last time, this will not perish .
    Therefore, he did not say to himself, in words, This girl attracts me. I shall possess her . Few men do.
    Any love affair was, with him, upon the knees of the gods. No one, he least of all, knew what tomorrow might bring. Sometimes, the quarry ran down, the capture effected, he would wake to find a woman in his arms; would wake, grateful, astonished, and superbly moved emotionally. Later when it was over, he would ask himself how it had happened. “I did not will it. It was not my fault.”
    The anchorite is not more mentally chaste than the true Casanova. For to the true Casanova every woman is the first, every woman is the last, love is as sentimental as an old-fashioned valentine, every love is the goal and the end of the road, each victory brings amazement.
    These are the men who never grow up, who do not pass perceptibly from adolescence into maturity, who are forever seeking the impossible, forever demanding the static and the stable of something as variable as the seasons and the winds; who look to the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end, and who say finally, it is tinsel after all, but the next rainbow shall not fail me. And who, insecure and somehow unsure of themselves, seek always to prove to themselves their own potence.
    Of such men was Dwight, one of that charming, tragic, and misinterpreted company whose opprobrium is so much more than they deserve because they mean no harm, and so much less, also because they mean no harm, and whose day of reckoning is blacker than any rumor because the other days have dawned so bright with promise. This is the company whose end is the Kiplingesque one of “sittin’ and thinkin’,” who, having grasped the shadow for the substance, cry out upon life as a cheater, and believe themselves cheated—never knowing that it was always the other way about.
    So David