“Tell me . . .”
“You know, don’t you?
Oh, you know.”
“Yes, but I want to hear you say it.”
“I love you, Amory, with all my heart.”
“Always, will you?”
“All my life—Oh, Amory—”
“What?”
“I want to belong to you.
I want your people to be my people. I want to have your babies.”
“But I haven’t any people.”
“Don’t laugh at me, Amory.
Just kiss me.”
“I’ll do what you want,” he said.
“No, I’ll do what you want.
We’re you—not me.
Oh, you’re so much a part, so much all of me . . .”
He closed his eyes.
“I’m so happy that I’m frightened.
Wouldn’t it be awful if this was—was the high point? . . .”
She looked at him dreamily.
“Beauty and love pass, I know....
Oh, there’s sadness, too.
I suppose all great happiness is a little sad.
Beauty means the scent of roses and then the death of roses—”
“Beauty means the agony of sacrifice and the end of agony. . . .”
“And, Amory, we’re beautiful, I know.
I’m sure God loves us—”
“He loves you.
You’re his most precious possession.”
“I’m not his, I’m yours. Amory, I belong to you.
For the first time I regret all the other kisses; now I know how much a kiss can mean.”
Then they would smoke and he would tell her about his day at the office—and where they might live.
Sometimes, when he was particularly loquacious, she went to sleep in his arms, but he loved that Rosalind—all Rosalinds—as he had never in the world loved any one else.
Intangibly fleeting, unrememberable hours.
Aquatic Incident
One day Amory and Howard Gillespie meeting by accident down-town took lunch together, and Amory heard a story that delighted him.
Gillespie after several cocktails was in a talkative mood; he began by telling Amory that he was sure Rosalind was slightly eccentric.
He had gone with her on a swimming party up in Westchester County, and some one mentioned that Annette Kellerman had been there one day on a visit and had dived from the top of a rickety, thirty-foot summer-house.
Immediately Rosalind insisted that Howard should climb up with her to see what it looked like.
A minute later, as he sat and dangled his feet on the edge, a form shot by him; Rosalind, her arms spread in a beautiful swan dive, had sailed through the air into the clear water.
“Of course I had to go, after that—and I nearly killed myself I thought I was pretty good to even try it.
Nobody else in the party tried it.
Well, afterward Rosalind had the nerve to ask me why I stooped over when I dove.
‘It didn’t make it any easier,’ she said, ‘it just took all the courage out of it.’
I ask you, what can a man do with a girl like that?
Unnecessary, I call it.”
Gillespie failed to understand why Amory was smiling delightedly all through lunch.
He thought perhaps he was one of these hollow optimists.
Five Weeks Later