Washington Square lay in restful beauty beneath its glittering blanket of snow. Here and there were rounded mounds, hillocks of whiteness whose framework were iron benches that had held countless pairs of lovers in the gentle warmth of spring or the torrid breathlessness of summer. The commonplace, ugly fences had been transformed miraculously into graceful lines of ethereal, ghostlike, shimmering whiteness. The harsh lines of the Arch had been rounded and softened until it seemed like a huge cake of frosted icing baked for some Gargantuan wedding feast. Across the Square loomed the church Stanford White had designed, the cross above the mass of yellow brick purified by its coating of white.
In the little patches of earth enclosed by the fences, gusts of wind were taking the new-fallen snow, swirling it in graceful spirals that danced and pirouetted with such sinuous loveliness that beside them Pavlowa would have seemed a clumsy, heavy-footed rustic doing a barn dance. Here and there scurried along a figure, head bent before the icy wind, or a lumbering Fifth Avenue bus with its green sides visible in spots free from the encrustations of snow. The verdant hue of the buses or the blackness of clothing only accentuated the whiteness around the moving figures. As if awed by the phenomenon of the transformation, old but ever new, all sound was muffled, an encircling blanket of stillness gripped and held all things, animate and inanimate, in its soft grip.
For hours Mimi sat and looked out upon the Square, long hours after Jimmie had ploughed his way down the steps and disappeared in the distance as he forged his way through the snow to the subway. Why, she asked herself—and in presenting the question to herself she placed it before some greater power, some wiser and more farseeing, One beyond