A Young Man's Heart Read Online Free PDF

Mariquita turned to him.
    “Kiss me,” she said quite simply.
    He looked at her uncomprehendingly. This was not part of their usual program.
    Suddenly she placed her lips on his for a second. A momentary scent of cinnamon caught fleetingly. Mariquita leaned her shoulders back against the sun-drenched wall once more and seemed to be thinking of other things. There was no reaction.
    Blair knew what a kiss was but had never seen any special merit in it. On one of his Sunday afternoon visits to the Parisiana, the Pearl White film had broken in the middle and they had to insert a French picture in its place. He could still recall how bitterly disappointing it had been. It had no hairbreadth escapes, no cowboys, no Indians, no Chinese smugglers, nothing at all of interest. Only some women who occupied themselves with smelling flowers with a most tragic mien, crying, laughing some, then crying again. And at the end, in place of that delicious, shivery, exquisitely regretful interruption that proclaimed “To be continued next week” just when excitement had become all but unendurable, there was nothing more than a banal embrace and kiss between a hero who had been no hero at all and one of the unworthy tear-drenched beauties who had not once been dropped into a well nor tied to a barrel of gunpowder (a thing Pearl White had never done in any picture was kiss or cry or smell flowers). A good deal of unruly stamping on the floor on the part of junior members of the audience accompanied this insipid finale.
    This was the first time Blair had seen a kiss. Utterly erased from his memory were any possible kisses from Sasha when he had been smaller. When he had grown bigger Sasha had not kissed him. And the thought of Sasha’s having been kissed at any time by Giraldy, had it occurred to him, would have seemed about as incongruous as the thought of a German soldier kissing a French soldier (1916).
    Although the incident of the kiss was not repeated, a sentimental attachment gradually took its place along with their cavorting. The twisting of her hands by Blair had definitely stopped some time back. Even the baby had grown less repugnant to him, tottering on its own feet now and bleating when they left it too far behind. Once he even carried it for her when she had an armful of leaves for the scouring of kitchen utensils, but a suspicion of dampness on his sleeve caused him to return it to her in disgust. They were a little self-conscious now about phenomena like that. Mariquita chastely slapped the baby’s arm and made it cry. Blair relieved her of the leaves, which he at least knew were incapable of any treachery, and walked along with his chin thrust out above their inanimate heads.
    That Mariquita’s feelings toward him already bordered on the mature was indicated plainly enough the day a stranger appeared on the horizon. A friend of Estelle’s, and one of the very few who had allowed child-bearing to be a complement to matrimony, came to the house one day for tea and brought her young Saxon daughter along with her. The latter, with hair the color and texture of corn-silk, was permitted a single tea wafer and then propelled gently but firmly out of the house. She emerged from the doorway shading her weak blue eyes from the glare of the sun. At the same time one of the tall French windows opened in the middle and revealed Estelle and her guest standing shoulder to shoulder. “There he is,” Estelle remarked. She raised her voice and added, “Blair, I have some company for you.” The newcomer stood waiting expectantly. Estelle and her friend withdrew as suddenly as they had appeared and shut the window.
    “Come over here,” Blair called. “I don’t want to go over there, it’s too hot.”
    She crossed the street slowly and a sudden bluish aura leaped up and enveloped her white dress as she passed into the realm of shade and coolness cast by the pink plaster wall. When she had joined them she gave Blair a single impartial