They ate but little.  She tasted a few mouthfuls, and then clambered on to his knee and lay in his arms, burying her face against his shoulder.  She might have been asleep but that she sometimes put up her hand and stroked his hair and traced his eyebrows and made a little purring noise; and once she cried a little and exclaimed pettishly, “It’s just lack of sleep.  I’m not anxious.  I’m not a bit anxious.”  And presently she looked up at the alarum clock and said, “That’s never nine?  We must go.  Richard, you are great company!” She ran upstairs to dress, singing in the sweetest little voice, wild yet low and docile, such as a bird might have if it were christened.  When she came down she faced him with gentle defiance and said, “I know I’m awful plain to-night.  I suppose you’ll not love me any more?” He answered, “Be downright ugly if you can.  It won’t matter to me.  I love you anyhow.”  She lifted her hand to turn out the gas and smiled at him over her shoulder.  “If that’s not handsome!” she drawled mockingly, but in her glance, though she dropped her lids, there burned a flame of earnestness, and just as he was going to open the front door she slipped into his arms and rested there, shaken with some deep emotion, with words she felt too young to say.

“What is it?  What is it you want to say?  Tell me.”

“Do you think we can do it, Richard?  Love each other always.  Now, it’s easy.  We’re young.  It’s easier to be nice when you’re young....  But mother and father must have cared for each other once.  She kept his letters.  After everything she kept his letters....  It’s when one gets old ... old people quarrel and are mean.  Ah, do you think we will be able to keep it up?”

She was remembering, he could see, the later married life of her parents, and conceiving it for the first time not with the harsh Puritan moral vision of the young, as the inevitable result of deliberate ill-conduct, but as the decay of an intention for which the persons involved were hardly more to blame than is an industrious gardener for the death of a plant whose habit he has not understood.  It was, to one newly possessed of happiness, a terrifying conception.

He muttered, low-voiced and ashamed as those are who speak of things much more sacred than the common tenor of their lives:  “Of course it’ll be difficult after the first few years.  But it’s hard to be a saint.  Yet there have been saints.  All that they do for their religion I’ll do for you.  I will keep clear of evil things lest they spoil the feelings I have for you.  I....  There are thoughts like prayers....  And, darling ...  I do not believe in God ... yet I know that through you I shall find ... something the same as God....”  He could not say it all.  But it communicated itself in their long unpassionate kiss.