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HE had been twenty-five for a month and a week; it was bearable as is everything that must be borne; but it was still incredible. "My twenty-sixth year!" she said to herself. "That's the same as the twenty-seventh—or twenty-eighth" And she thought of herself as "outside of life" now, forever. "I've chosen not to live," she thought. "What's the difference between that and suicide?"

Her mother had gone to a concert; Claire was alone in the apartment and she stood at a window, from this high cliffside looking forth upon tower and abyss illumined by the prodigious night flares. The new skyline, staggering with the new sky-scrapers, rose even above her, overwhelming the stars with the blatant giantism of the new New York. She felt its huge provincial commonness, its stupendous materialism and its frantic magnificence; but in the main it seemed to her a Titanic honeycomb of lighted cells, with open doors through which flitted hordes and hordes of girls breathlessly hungry for the approval of men