Passing a Woolworth‘s, she gripped my arm: ‘Let‘s steal something,‘ she said, pulling me into the store, where at once there seemed a pressure of eyes, as though we were already under suspicion. ‘Come on. Don‘t be chicken.‘ She scouted a counter piled with paper pumpkins and Hallowe‘en masks. The sales lady was occupied with a group of nuns who were trying on masks. Holly picked up a mask and slipped it over her face; she chose another and put it on mine; then she took my hand and we walked away. It was as simple as that. Outside, we ran a few blocks, I think to make it more dramatic; but also because, as I‘d discovered, successful theft exhilarates. I wondered if she‘d often stolen. ‘I used to,‘ she said. ‘I mean I had to. If I wanted anything. But I still do it every now and then, sort of to keep my hand in.‘
We wore the masks all the way home. - P65
Perhaps, like most of us in a foreign country, he was incapable of placing people, selecting a frame for their picture, as he would at home; therefore all Americans had to be judged in a pretty equal light, and on this basis his companions appeared to be tolerable examples of local colour and national character. That would explain much; Holly‘s determination explains the rest. - P66
Late one afternoon, while waiting for a Fifth Avenue bus, I noticed a taxi stop across the street to let out a girl who ran up the steps of the Forty-second Street public library. She was through the doors before I recognized her, which was pardonable, for Holly and libraries were not an easy association to make. I let curiosity guide me between the lions, debating on the way whether I should admit following her or pretend coincidence. In the end I did neither, but concealed myself some tables away from her in the general reading room, where she sat behind her dark glasses and a fortress of literature she‘d gathered at the desk. She sped from one book to the next, intermittently lingering on a page, always with a frown, as if it were printed upside down. She had a pencil poised above paper - nothing seemed to catch her fancy, still now and then, as though for the hell of it, she made laborious scribblings. Watching her, I remembered a girl I‘d known in school, a grind, Mildred Grossman. - P67
Earth and air could not be more opposite than Mildred and Holly, yet in my head they acquired a Siamese twinship, and the thread of thought that had sewn them together ran like this:the average personality reshapes frequently, every few years even our bodies undergo a complete overhaul - desirable or not, it is a natural thing that we should change. All right, here were two people who never would. That is what Mildred Grossman had in common with Holly Golightly. They wouldn ever change because they‘d been given their character too soon; which, like sudden riches, leads to a lack of proportion: the one had splurged herself into a top-heavy realist, the other a lopsided romantic. I imagined them in a restaurant of the future, Mildred still studying the menu for its nutritional values, Holly still gluttonous for everything on it. It would never be different. They would walk through life and out of it with the same determined step that took small notice of those cliffs at the left. Such profound observations made me forget where I was; I came to, startled to find myself in the gloom of the library, and surprised all over again to see Holly there. - P68
She shrugged. A few extra trips to the powder room. Promise me, though. Promise you‘ll never put a living thing in it.‘
I started to kiss her, but she held out her hand.
‘Gimme,‘ she said, tapping the bulge in my pocket.
‘I‘m afraid it isn‘t much,‘ and it wasn‘t; a St Christopher‘s medal. But at least it came from Tiffany‘s. - P70
Holly was not a girl who could keep anything, and surely by now she has lost that medal, left it in a suitcase or some hotel drawer. But the bird cage is still mine. I‘ve lugged it to New Orleans, Nantucket, all over Europe, Morocco, the West Indies. Yet I seldom remember that it was Holly who gave it to me, because at one point I chose to forget: we had a big falling-out, and among the objects rotating in the eye of our hurricane were the bird cage and O. J. Berman and my story, a copy of which I‘d given Holly when it appeared in the university review. - P70
We had an irresistible guide, most of him Negro and the rest of him Chinese, and while I don‘t go much for one or the other, the combination was fairly riveting: so I let him play kneesie under the table, because frankly I didn‘t find him at all banal;but then one night he took us to a blue movie, and what do you suppose? There he was on the screen. Of course when we got back to Key West, Mag was positive I‘d spent the whole time sleeping with José. So was Rusty: but he doesn‘t care about that, he simply wants to hear the details. Actually, things were pretty tense until I had a heart-to-heart with Mag. - P71
My hand, smoothing oil on her skin, seemed to have a temper of its own: it yearned to raise itself and come down on her buttocks. ‘Give me an example,‘
I said quietly. ‘Of something that means something.
In your opinion.‘ - P73
I went straight upstairs, got the bird cage, took it down, and left it in front of her door. That settled that. Or so I imagined until the next morning when, as I was leaving for work, I saw the cage perched on a sidewalk ash can waiting for the garbage collector.
Rather sheepishly, I rescued it and carried it back to my room, a capitulation that did not lessen my resolve to put Holly Golightly absolutely out of my life. She was, I decided, ‘a crude exhibitionist‘, ‘a time waster‘,
‘an utter fake‘: someone never to be spoken to again. - P74
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