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“Do you remember, Michael,” she said, “the butcher shops uptown, the groceries, and the fruit stores, where the commonest articles, the chops, the preserved strawberries, the apples were perfect and beautiful, like works of art? In one window there was a great olive branch in a glass jar–do you remember? And in that fruit store near the Grand Central–do you remember?–we stood in the damp snow and looked in at great clean spaces flooded with white light–and there were baskets of strawberries–right there in January–and wonderful golden and red fruits that we did not know the names of, and many of the fruits peeped out from the bright-green leaves among which they had actually grown–“

“I remember the two prize bunches of grapes,” I said.

And my wife said:

“I was coming to those … they must have been eighteen inches long, every grape great and perfect. I remember you said that such grapes looked immortal. It was impossible to believe they could ever rot–there was a kind of joyous frostiness–we went in and asked a little man what kind of grapes they were, and he answered like a phonograph, without looking or showing politeness: ‘Black Hamburgs and White Muscats of Alexandria’–your old Sienkiewicz never said anything as beautiful as that, ‘White Muscats of Alexandria–‘”

“Dear little heart,” I said. “Childkin, is it the memory of those white grapes that tempts your appetite?”

“Oh, Michael,” she exclaimed, clasping her hands over those disappointed breasts into which the milk had not come in sufficiency. “Oh, Michael–they were two dollars and a half a pound–“

“Heart of my heart,” I said, “Stag Eyes, it is now late, and there are no such grapes to be had in our part of the city–only the tasteless white grapes that are packed with sawdust into barrels–but in the morning I will go uptown and you shall have your White Muscats of Alexandria.”

She put her arms about my neck with a sudden spasm of fervor, and drew my head, that was already gray, down to hers. I remember that in that moment I thought not of passion but of old age, parting, and the grave.

* * * * *

But she would not eat the grapes in my presence. There was to be an orgy, she said, a bacchanalian affair–she was going to place the grapes where she could look at them, and look at them until she could stand the sight no more, when she would fall on them like a wolf on the fold and devour them. She talked morbidly of the grapes–almost neurotically. But, though her fancies did not please my sense of fitness, I only laughed at her, or smiled–for she had been ill a long time.

“But, at least, eat one now,” I said, “so that I may see you enjoy it.”

“Not even one,” she said. “The bunch must be perfect for me to look at until–until I can resist no more. Hang them there, on the foot of the bed by the crook of the stem–is it strong enough to hold them? and then–aren’t you going to be very late to your business? And, Michael, I feel better–I do. I shouldn’t wonder if you found me up and dressed when you come back.”

In your telling American phrase, “there was nothing doing” in my business that morning. It was one of those peaceful, sunny days in January, not cold and no wind stirring. The cheap furs displayed in the window of my shop attracted no attention from the young women of the neighborhood. The young are shallow-minded, especially the women. If a warm day falls in winter they do not stop to think that the next may be cold. Only hats interest them all the year round, and men.

So I got out one of my Cicero books and, placing my chair in a pool of sunshine in the front of the shop, I began to read, for the hundredth time, his comfortable generalities upon old age. But it seemed to me, for the first time, that he was all wrong–that old age is only dreadful, only a shade better than death itself. And this, I suppose, was because I, myself, during those long months of my wife’s illness, had turned the corner. The sudden passions of youth had retreated like dragons into their dens. It took more, now, than the worse end of a bargain or the touch of my wife’s lips to bring them flaming forth. On our wedding day we had been of an age. Now, after nine years, my heart had changed from a lover’s into a father’s, while she remained, as it were, a bride. There remained to me, perhaps, many useful years of business, of managing and of saving–enjoyable years. But life–life as I count life–I had lived out. One moment must pass as the next. There could be no more halting–no more moments of bliss so exquisite as to resemble pain. I had reached that point in life when it is the sun alone that matters, and no more the moon.