tories about little girls
who break their spines and get adopted by grouchy old men because they
smile so much. You'd think we were a race of cheerful cripples and that
the common end of the Russian peasant was suicide--"

"Six o'clock," said Amory, glancing at his wrist-watch. "I'll buy you
a grea' big dinner on the strength of the Juvenalia of your collected
editions."

*****

LOOKING BACKWARD

July sweltered out with a last hot week, and Amory in another surge of
unrest realized that it was just five months since he and Rosalind had
met. Yet it was already hard for him to visualize the heart-whole boy
who had stepped off the transport, passionately desiring the adventure
of life. One night while the heat, overpowering and enervating, poured
into the windows of his room he struggled for several hours in a vague
effort to immortalize the poignancy of that time.

The February streets, wind-washed by night, blow full of strange
half-intermittent damps, bearing on wasted walks in shining sight
wet snow plashed into gleams under the lamps, like golden oil
from some divine machine, in an hour of thaw and stars.

Strange damps--full of the eyes of many men, crowded with life
borne in upon a lull.... Oh, I was young, for I could turn
again to you, most finite and most beautiful, and taste the stuff
of half-remembered dreams, sweet and new on your mouth.

... There was a tanging in the midnight air--silence was dead and
sound not yet awoken--Life cracked like ice!--one brilliant note
and there, radiant and pale, you stood... and spring had broken.
(The icicles were short upon the roofs and the changeling city
swooned.)

Our thoughts were frosty mist along the eaves; our two ghosts
kissed, high on the long, mazed wires--eerie half-laughter echoes
here and leaves only a fatuous sigh for young desires; regret has
followed after things she loved, leaving the great husk.

*****

ANOTHER ENDING

In mid-August came a letter from Monsignor Darcy, who had evidently just
stumbled on his address:

MY DEAR BOY:--

Your last letter was quite enough to make me worry about you. It was
not a bit like yourself. Reading between the lines I should imagine that
your engagement to this girl is making you rather unhappy, and I see you
have lost all the feeling of romance that you had before the war. You
make a great mistake if you think you can be romantic without religion.