“Waiting hurts, naturally,--and I'm the person who used to wonder about girls making such a fuss about how soon they got married--but, then, Ollie, of course, I never really wanted to get married before myself and somehow that seems to make a difference. But that's the way things go--and the only thing I wish is that I was the only person to be hurt. We will, sooner or later, and it will be all the better for our not having grabbed at once--at least that's what all the old people with no emotions left are always so anxious to tell you. But they talk about it as if anybody under thirty-five who wanted to get married was acting like a three-year-old stealing jam--and that's annoying. And anyhow, it wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so silly, I suppose--” “Waiting hurts, naturally,” and that casual sentence made him chilly afraid. For to be in love, though it may force the lover to actions of impossible courage does not make him in the least courageous of himself, but only drives him by the one large fear of losing this love like a soldier pricked from behind by a bayonet over the bodies of smaller fears, or like a thief who has stolen treasure, and, hearing the cry at his heels, scales a twenty foot wall with the agile gestures of a madman. All the old-wives' and young men's club stories of everything from broken engagements to the Generic and Proven Unfaithfulness of the Female Sex brushed like dirty cobwebs for an instant across his mind. They tightened about it like silk threads--a snaky web--and for one scared instant he had a sense of being smothered in dusty feathers, whispering together and saying, “When you're a little older and a great deal wiser. When you've come to my age and know that all girls are the same. When you realize that long engagements seldom mean marriage. When--” He put the cobwebs aside with a strain of will, for he was very tired in body, and settled himself to write to Nancy. It was not the cobwebs that hurt. The only thing that mattered was that she had been hurt on his account--was being hurt now on his account--would be hurt, and still and always on his account, not because he wanted to hurt her but because it was not within his power, but Life's, to hurt her in that respect or not. “Oh, felicitous Nancy!” the pen began to scratch. “Your letter--” Stupid to be so tired when he was writing to Nancy. Stupid not to find the right things to say at once when you wanted to say them so much. He dropped the pen an instant, sat back, and tried to evoke Nancy before him like a small, clear picture seen in a lens, tried to form with his will the lifeless air in front of him till it began to take on some semblance and body of her that would be better than the tired remembrances of the mind.