Under the Arc-Light

Under the Arc-Light.

Then tragedy’s emerald eyes glared suddenly at Amory over the edge of June. On the night after his ride to Lawrenceville a crowd sallied to New York in quest of adventure, and started back to Princeton about twelve o’clock in two machines. It had been a gay party and different stages of sobriety were represented. Amory was in the car behind; they had taken the wrong road and lost the way, and so were hurrying to catch up.

It was a clear night and the exhilaration of the road went to Amory’s head. He had the ghost of two stanzas of a poem forming in his mind….

So the gray car crept nightward in the dark and there was no life stirred as it went by…. As the still ocean paths before the shark in starred and glittering waterways, beauty-high, the moon-swathed trees divided, pa……