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 of golden 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 shuffled 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 much 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. The literary students read
Rupert Brooke passionately; the lounge-lizards worried over whethe