id Charlie, looking over my shoulder.

I thought it far from well, and very evil indeed, when he silently laid
a photograph on the paper--the photograph of a girl with a curly head,
and a foolish slack mouth.

"Isn't it--isn't it wonderful?" he whispered, pink to the tips of his
ears, wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. "I didn't know; I
didn't think--it came like a thunderclap."

"Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie?"

"My God--she--she loves me!" He sat down repeating the last words to
himself. I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already
bowed by desk-work, and wondered when, where, and how he had loved in
his past lives.

"What will your mother say?" I asked, cheerfully.

"I don't care a damn what she says."

At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should,
properly, be many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told
him this gently; and he described Her, even as Adam must have described
to the newly named beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve.
Incidentally I learned that She was a tobacconist's assistant with a
weakness for pretty dress, and had told him four or five times already
that She had never been kissed by a man before.

Charlie spoke on, and on, and on; while I, separated from him by
thousands of years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I
understood why the Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully
behind us. It is that we may not remember our first wooings. Were it not
so, our world would be without inhabitants in a hundred years.

"Now, about that galley-story," I said, still more cheerfully, in a
pause in the rush of the speech.

Charlie looked up as though he had been hit. "The galley--what galley?
Good heavens, don't joke, man! This is serious! You don't know how
serious it is!"

Grish Chunder was right. Charlie had tasted the love of woman that kills
remembrance, and the finest story in the world would never be written.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Phantom 'Rickshaw and Other Ghost
Stories, by Rudyard Kipling

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