“I have invented a litany, Hal. Will you listen to it? I invented it for the saddest people in the world. It goes like this: O God, be merciful to those who are free and must live with the fettered; to the scornful laughers who are bound to the humourless; to the swift who walk by the slow; and the idle who are bondsmen to the busy--and especially, O God, be merciful to all those whose spirits were young and whose generation denied them youth’s chance, amen. There must have been many like Daddy in his day.” Through the trees the half moon glowed like the polished end of a woman’s nail against a pink and sapphire West. It was an infinitely tender moment, the end of a week of betrothal, the eve of his departure for a trip North. “Let me, please, once more,” whispered Moira, “one I love.” And she quoted: “La lune blanche Luit dans les bois, De chaque branche Parte une voix, Sous la ramée, Oh, bien-aimée. “Une vaste et tendre Apaisement Semble descendre Du firmament Que l’astre irise.... C’est l’heure exquise!” “You gave me those,” she said. “They were a peace offering one Christmas, one year you had treated me very badly. I love them because they are all young, all fresh, ageless. Let’s you and I, dear, resolve to be young forever. Let’s make a bond of youth, cherish it, study to keep it, never let it go.” “Moira, you will never be older than this day.” “I think it is easy to stay young if one keeps one’s unreasonable likes. One should always like things that are a little twisted and strange, in spite of what people think. One must like Verlaine’s absinthe as well as Verlaine, Swinburne and Swinburne’s perversity also, Rob and his wickedness--the wickedness he doesn’t understand. You know, Hal, I didn’t go to college after all, because I was afraid it would make me old, it would give me ‘interests.’ I hate the word. As if everything wasn’t an interest!” They walked around by the flat, broad meadow, hushed in the dusk. The first whip-poor-will was calling. She clung to his arm, enjoying the sensation of firm muscles flexing under her hand. “I don’t care,” she cried. “I’m not afraid of anything. I would as soon give myself to you, all of me, now, to-night. The rest, all the fuss, does not count. What is there to fear in this glorious wide world, Hal?” “Nothing--but fear, I suppose,” he replied. Two white figures swaying together across the dusty furrows, they merged into the darkness like birds fluttering out of sight in the clouds. XIV