"Cather, Willa - Alexander's Bridge" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cather Willa Sibert)

approached the sullen gray mass at the end.
He had not been inside the Museum, actually,
since he and Hilda used to meet there;
sometimes to set out for gay adventures at
Twickenham or Richmond, sometimes to linger
about the place for a while and to ponder by
Lord Elgin's marbles upon the lastingness of
some things, or, in the mummy room, upon
the awful brevity of others. Since then
Bartley had always thought of the British
Museum as the ultimate repository of mortality,
where all the dead things in the world were
assembled to make one's hour of youth the
more precious. One trembled lest before he
got out it might somehow escape him, lest he
might drop the glass from over-eagerness and
see it shivered on the stone floor at his feet.
How one hid his youth under his coat and
hugged it! And how good it was to turn
one's back upon all that vaulted cold, to take
Hilda's arm and hurry out of the great door
and down the steps into the sunlight among
the pigeons--to know that the warm and vital
thing within him was still there and had not
been snatched away to flush Caesar's lean
cheek or to feed the veins of some bearded
Assyrian king. They in their day had carried
the flaming liquor, but to-day was his! So the
song used to run in his head those summer
mornings a dozen years ago. Alexander
walked by the place very quietly, as if
he were afraid of waking some one.

He crossed Bedford Square and found the
number he was looking for. The house,
a comfortable, well-kept place enough,
was dark except for the four front windows
on the second floor, where a low, even light was
burning behind the white muslin sash curtains.
Outside there were window boxes, painted white
and full of flowers. Bartley was making
a third round of the Square when he heard the
far-flung hoof-beats of a hansom-cab horse,
driven rapidly. He looked at his watch,
and was astonished to find that it was
a few minutes after twelve. He turned and
walked back along the iron railing as the
cab came up to Hilda's number and stopped.
The hansom must have been one that she employed
regularly, for she did not stop to pay the driver.