She turned like a flash.
“I have never been in love.”
They walked along, and he realized slowly how much she had told him ... never in love.... She seemed suddenly a daughter of light alone.
His entity dropped out of her plane and he longed only to touch her dress with almost the realization that Joseph must have had of Mary’s eternal significance.
But quite mechanically he heard himself saying:
“And I love you—any latent greatness that I’ve got is ... oh, I can’t talk, but Clara, if I come back in two years in a position to marry you—”
She shook her head.
“No,” she said; “I’d never marry again.
I’ve got my two children and I want myself for them.
I like you—I like all clever men, you more than any—but you know me well enough to know that I’d never marry a clever man—” She broke off suddenly.
“Amory.”
“What?”
“You’re not in love with me.
You never wanted to marry me, did you?”
“It was the twilight,” he said wonderingly. “I didn’t feel as though I were speaking aloud.
But I love you—or adore you—or worship you—”
“There you go—running through your catalogue of emotions in five seconds.”
He smiled unwillingly.
“Don’t make me out such a light-weight, Clara; you are depressing sometimes.”
“You’re not a light-weight, of all things,” she said intently, taking his arm and opening wide her eyes—he could see their kindliness in the fading dusk. “A light-weight is an eternal nay.”
“There’s so much spring in the air—there’s so much lazy sweetness in your heart.”
She dropped his arm.
“You’re all fine now, and I feel glorious.
Give me a cigarette.
You’ve never seen me smoke, have you?
Well, I do, about once a month.”
And then that wonderful girl and Amory raced to the corner like two mad children gone wild with pale-blue twilight.
“I’m going to the country for to-morrow,” she announced, as she stood panting, safe beyond the flare of the corner lamppost. “These days are too magnificent to miss, though perhaps I feel them more in the city.”
“Oh, Clara!” Amory said; “what a devil you could have been if the Lord had just bent your soul a little the other way!”
“Maybe,” she answered; “but I think not.
I’m never really wild and never have been.
That little outburst was pure spring.”
“And you are, too,” said he.
They were walking along now.
“No—you’re wrong again, how can a person of your own self-reputed brains be so constantly wrong about me?
I’m the opposite of everything spring ever stood for.
It’s unfortunate, if I happen to look like what pleased some soppy old Greek sculptor, but I assure you that if it weren’t for my face I’d be a quiet nun in the convent without”—then she broke into a run and her raised voice floated back to him as he followed—“my precious babies, which I must go back and see.”
She was the only girl he ever knew with whom he could understand how another man might be preferred.
Often Amory met wives whom he had known as debutantes, and looking intently at them imagined that he found something in their faces which said:
“Oh, if I could only have gotten you!”
Oh, the enormous conceit of the man!
But that night seemed a night of stars and singing and Clara’s bright soul still gleamed on the ways they had trod.
“Golden, golden is the air—” he chanted to the little pools of water.... “Golden is the air, golden notes from golden mandolins, golden frets ofgolden violins, fair, oh, wearily fair.... Skeins from braided basket, mortals may not hold; oh, what young extravagant God, who would know or ask it? ... who could give such gold...”
Amory Is Resentful
Slowly and inevitably, yet with a sudden surge at the last, while Amory talked and dreamed, war rolled swiftly up the beach and washed the sands where Princeton played.
Every night the gymnasium echoed as platoon after platoon swept over the floor and shuf fled out the basket-ball markings.
When Amory went to Washington the next week-end he caught some of the spirit of crisis which changed to repulsion in the Pullman car coming back, for the berths across from him were occupied by stinking aliens—Greeks, he guessed, or Russians.
He thought how mush easier patriotism had been to a homogeneous race, how much easier it would have been to fight as the Colonies fought, or as the Confederacy fought.
And he did no sleeping that night, but listened to the aliens guffaw and snore while they filled the car with the heavy scent of latest America.
In Princeton every one bantered in public and told themselves privately that their deaths at least would be heroic.