Shadows in Paradise

"It's fall," she said, with one of her abrupt changes of mood. "It's a hard season to live through even without being alone."

Maybe the fall has hit me harder than you. In the fall all pacts are suspended. In the fall people only want ... What do we want in the fall?"
"Love," I said.

Tomorrow or the day after I'd throw myself into the struggle for a livelihood, the daily round of parry and thrust, of deceptions and half-lies, but tonight the city held out its impartial face to me like a monstrance, every feature etched in the finest filigree. It had not yet caught me up in its net, but confronted me as equal to equal. Time seemed to stand still, as though for this one moment in the darkness the great scales were evenly balanced between active and passive.