winter, but
summer..."

"Summer has no day," she said. "We can't possibly have a summer love. So
many people have tried that the name's become proverbial. Summer is
only the unfulfilled promise of spring, a charlatan in place of the
warm balmy nights I dream of in April. It's a sad season of life without
growth.... It has no day."

"Fourth of July," Amory suggested facetiously.

"Don't be funny!" she said, raking him with her eyes.

"Well, what could fulfil the promise of spring?"

She thought a moment.

"Oh, I suppose heaven would, if there was one," she said finally, "a
sort of pagan heaven--you ought to be a materialist," she continued
irrelevantly.

"Why?"

"Because you look a good deal like the pictures of Rupert Brooke."

To some extent Amory tried to play Rupert Brooke as long as he knew
Eleanor. What he said, his attitude toward life, toward her, toward
himself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman's literary moods.
Often she sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing with her short hair,
her voice husky as she ran up and down the scale from Grantchester to
Waikiki. There was something most passionate in Eleanor's reading aloud.
They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically, when they read,
than when she was in his arms, and this was often, for they fell half
into love almost from the first. Yet was Amory capable of love now?
He could, as always, run through the emotions in a half hour, but even
while they revelled in their imaginations, he knew that neither of them
could care as he had cared once before--I suppose that was why they
turned to Brooke, and Swinburne, and Shelley. Their chance was to make
everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend
tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the
place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much
of a dream.

One poem they read over and over; Swinburne's "Triumph of Time," and
four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw
the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of many
frogs. Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him,
and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a fleecy-headed drum,
repeating:

"Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour,
To think of things that are well outworn;
Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower,
The dream foregone and the deed foreborne?"

They were formal