The Coolidge examiner., 1932-05-06
DREAM
WALTZ
BY Fannie Hurst
90 by Mcclure Newspaper Syndicate.)
(WNlJ Service)
" 7HEN Leonard was twenty.

IW7daEaN ;, Leonard onanaa.~S was . twenty, %enty,
w waltz. 1t was published,
caught on, and for a considerable
while the entire land was dancing
to it and humming.
Incidentally, 1t made quite a pile
of money for Leonard, enabling him
to plan a trip 10 Greece there to
sat sly some sort of cOngenial
h,hger in his Middle West soul, to
sav nothing of the fact that, for a.
least a six-month, he was quite a
celebrity. His home town hon
Cred him; even New York bowed to
him upon his arrival there to take
| ship. and for one brief second In
his scheme of things, the gods took
notice of lean gangling fellow
with a shock of blond hair, who
hailed from a town called Granite
City, and through whose common
place looking Uranium had waited
the haunting melody of a dream.
Everywhere he went for those few
months, the melody went with him,
following him like a wisp of lovely
smoke. In restaurants. when he
entered, the orchestra played him
his dream waltz; on dance floors,
youth, with drugged looking eyes,
moved rhythmically to it. Even on
street corners, barrel organs sent
his dream waltz tumbling into the
street din. They were short, ex-
cited melodious months, dominated
by the subtle aura of success.
1t was in New York. while wait
Ing to take the ship for the Aegean
Islands, that he met a slip of girl
from Brooklyn endowed with the
absurdly incongruous and beautiful
name of Hesper. She was a fiat
voiced. satin-skinned, colloquial,
qulck-minded, city-minded, city
turned little piece, one of hordes
who milled through the daily scene,
but to Leonard, from the moment
he clapped eyes on her seated on a
! high stool beside him at an ice
cream counter, a nymph who must
have slipped out of the surf of the
ocean surrounding Manhattan.
Their courtship was quick, citi-
| fed and ended in marriage. The
trip TO the Aegean, of course, was
! shelved, first because Hesper pre-
ferred to purchase furniture with
the money and secondly. because
any spot she chose to be, became
/ the Aegean isles to Leonard.
They were married on Mon
day, had fitted up a pert little filing
cabinet of a fiat by the following
Monday, and in another week were
neatly adjusted into a well-oiIed
routine of the butcher. the baker,
the refrigerator defroster; the dumb
waiter, the subway, the vermin ex-
| terminator.
Nor was the transition of hopes
and plans difficult for Leonard.
Hesper was more delectable, if pos
sible, in marriage than she had
been in courtship. Built like a doll,
her quick pink tongue, her darting
adorably wayward eye, her flashing
little temper, her irresistible re-
morse were as elusive, as madden
ing, as appetizing to him, as had
been the elusive strains of his
waltz before he captured them all.
For a twelve month they lived,
these two children, captured into
the cave of their Manhattan fiat,
the deliciously irresponsible. unin-
hibited lives of playboy and play
girl.
Then the funds gave out, the
vogue Of the dream waltz began to
go the way of all vogues, and life
began to become the serious busi-
ness it can manage to be upon oc-
casion.
What subsequently happened,
came much more gradually than it
seems in the telling. The first dim
ming of the luster Of the vivacious-
ness that was Hespers did not
come until those first strangely
solemn days when it became neces-
sary for the little household, build
ed on the dream waltz, to sit
solemnly down and take note of its
budget. And then, almost before
they could catch their breath over
the narrow margin of their re-
sources, Hesper's twin girls were
born and ten months thereafter, a
boy, and ten months after that, an
other.
Thereupon, this story takes its
all too usual course. The gradual
conflict of wear and tear, worry and
financial strain upon beauty, youth
and ,iope. For almost year,
battling with the haunting desires
for melody that still lay torment
ed in the hinterlands of his mind.
Leonard, borrowing, devising,
scheming to meet his budget, strove
to recapture some of the quality
that had poured into the dream
waltz.
At the end of fourteen months.