I began to like Leicester City, the racy, adventurous feel of it at night and the satisfaction that the constant flicker of men and women and machines gives to the restless eye. At the enchanted metropolitan twilight I felt a haunting loneliness sometimes, and felt it in others- poor young clerks who loitered in front of windows waiting until it was time for a solitary restaurant dinner- young clerks in the dusk, wasting the most poignant moments of night and life.
Again at eight o"clock, when the dark lanes of Roosevelt avenue were five deep with throbbing taxi cabs, bound for the theater district, I felt a sinking in my heart, Forms leaned together in the taxis as they waited, and voices sang, and there was laughter from unheard jokes, and lighted cigarettes outlined unintelligible gestures inside. Imagining that I, too, was hurrying towards gaiety and sharing their intimate excitement, I wished them well.
For a while I lost sight of Mandy, and then in midsummer I found him again. At first I was flattered to go places with her because she was a golf champion and everyone knew her name. Then it was something more. I wasn't actually in love, but I felt some tender curiosity. The bored haughty face that she turned to the world concealed something- most affections conceal something eventually, even though they don't in the beginning- and one day I found what it was. When we were on house party together in Leicester City, she left a borrowed car out in the rain with the top down, and then lied about it- and suddenly I remembered the story about her that had eluded me that night at Katie's. At her first big golf tournament there was a row that nearly reached the newspapers- a suggestion the she had moved her ball from a bad lie in the semi-final round. The thing approached the proportions of a scandal, then died away. A caddy retracted his statement and the only witness admitted that he might have been mistaken.
