on november tenth

For a month Kira had not approached the neighbourhood of the mansion with a broken garden fence, she had not thought of the garden, for she did not want to see it empty, even before her own closed eyes. But on November Tenth she walked towards it calmly, evenly, without hurry, without doubts.

Darkness was coming, not from the gray, transparent sky, but from the corners of houses where shadows suddenly grew thicker, as if without reason. Slow whirls of smoke over chimneys were rusty in the rays of cold, invisible sunset somewhere beyond the clouds. In store windows kerosene lamps stood on the sills, melting yellow circles on the huge, frozen panes, around little ornage dots of trembling fire. It had snowed. Whipped into mud by horses’ hoofs, the first snow looked like a pale coffee with thin, melting splinters of sugar. It hushed the city into a soft, padded silence. Hoofs thumped through the mud with a clear, wet sound, as if someone were clicking his tongue loudly, rhythmically, and the sound rolled, dying, down long, darkening streets.

Kira turned a corner; she saw the black lances bowing to the snow, and the trees gathering snatches of cotton in the black net of bare branches. Then, for one second, she stopped, because she was suddenly afraid to look; then she looked into the garden.

He stood on the steps of the mansion, his hands in his pockets, his collar raised. She stopped to look at him. But he heard her and turned quickly.

He walked to meet her. He smiled at her, his mouth a scornful arc. “Allo, Kira.”

“Good evening, Leo.”

-Ayn Rand, We The Living

One of my favourite pieces of the story, when Kira meets Leo for the second time, after anxiously waiting for a month. Time just doesn’t flow as we wish it to