NINTH AVENUE
·NINTH·
AVENUE
By
MAXWELL
BODENHEIM
New York
BONI & LIVERIGHT
1926
COPYRIGHT 1926 :: BY
BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
PART ONE
NINTH AVENUE
CHAPTER I
When the light of morning touches the buildingsand pavements of a city, it always seems to borrowtheir hardness and to lose in some degree its qualityof flowing detachment. The Sunday morning that fellupon Ninth Avenue, New York City, gave you a senseof invisible stiffness in its very air. The buildings,with their smudged, flat fronts and tops, presentedthe impression of huge warehouses stretching downboth sides of the street—the appearance of holdingcommodities rather than human beings. Most of themwere five or six stories in height, and their curtained,oblong windows and the bright, tawdry shops at theirbase had an oddly lifeless aspect, in spite of the soundsand animations which occurred within and aroundthem. The iron elevated-railroad structure that extendeddown the street, with all of its roar and rush oftrains, could not destroy the spirit of silent inertiathat lurked within the scene.
Blanche Palmer stood in front of a bureau, in oneof the apartments that lined the street, and combedher dark red, bobbed hair, as though it were a sacredand perilous performance. She was only partiallydressed, and the mild light that came in through a[10]rear window from the courtyard brought an extravividness to her semiplump arms, abruptly roundedshoulders and moderately swelling bosom. Theirfreshness stood out, a little forlorn and challenging,in the disordered room with its half drab and halfgaudy arrangements. The brass bed, the magazine-postersof pretty women against the pink-floweredwallpaper, the red plush chair with the most infinitelysmug of shapes, the white chintz, half-dirty curtainand dark green shade at the window—all of themseemed to be meanly contending against the youth andlife of her body.
She was fairly tall, with most of the weight of herbody centered below her waist and with an incongruouslysmall torso, but this effect was not as clumsyas it might have been, since it was relieved by a boldapproach to symmetry. Something of a child and anamazon met in her body. Her face was not pretty ifyou examined each of its features separately—theoverwide lips, the nose tilting out too suddenly at thetip, and the overstraight, shaved eyebrows—but thewhole of it had a piquant and enticing irregularity, andit was redeemed by her large, deeply set, bluish-grayeyes and the fine smoothness of her cream-white skin.
Her twenty years of life had given her a self-consciousnes