just where there had stood a huge rock dripping with ice, and from this cave a band of nymphs rushed out and surrounded him with a circle of spears—and then Winter herself came into the sunlight and waved them back and said: "For this is he!"
She had come to reward him for his devotion!
He gathered up his books from the reading-table, returned them at the library desk, and hurried out to the street to be alone among the multitudes of the city with this new make-believe.
She led him into her underground palace—which proved to be an Aladdin's cave encrusted with precious stones set in ice—its floors covered with the skins of polar bears, its walls shining with theatrical stalactites like the wizard's cavern; and when they were alone in a wonderful secret chamber out of the "Arabian Nights," they sat down to a Homeric feast of nectar and ambrosia. She told him how she had watched over him in the woods, patting him on the cheeks with snowflakes and caressing him with the winds. She had longed to speak to him, but—but intercourse with mortals was forbidden by the gods; and now, having sworn her attendant nymphs to secrecy, she was daring all the angers of Olympus by making herself visible to him and receiving him here in this enchanted cave which she had made for him unknown to Jupiter.
He walked up Broadway, listening to her complaints of loneliness, of the disregard of men who had become afraid of her since they began to herd together in cities and avoid the bracing airs and healthful exercises of the winter; and he tried to console her with his own
