terday--the same old business--I might be studying in Paris,
now, instead of teaching drawing to stupid little girls, if I hadn't
'formed' what she will call 'that unfortunate attachment.' Not that I
minded, really, though I was angry enough to bite her when she gave
a long undertaker's list of Penniless Authors' Brides. But it worries
mother--and that worries me--and I wish she wouldn't. Forgive me,
Ollie--and then that Richardson complex of mother's came up again--"

"Waiting hurts, naturally,--and I'm the person who used to wonder about
girls making such a fuss about how soon they got married--but, then,
Ollie, of course, I never really wanted to get married before myself
and somehow that seems to make a difference. But that's the way things
go--and the only thing I wish is that I was the only person to be hurt.
We will, sooner or later, and it will be all the better for our not
having grabbed at once--at least that's what all the old people with no
emotions left are always so anxious to tell you. But they talk about
it as if anybody under thirty-five who wanted to get married was acting
like a three-year-old stealing jam--and that's annoying. And anyhow, it
wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so silly, I suppose--"

"Waiting hurts, naturally," and that casual sentence made him chilly
afraid. For to be in love, though it may force the lover to actions of
impossible courage does not make him in the least courageous of himself,
but only drives him by the one large fear of losing this love like a
soldier pricked from behind by a bayonet over the bodies of smaller
fears, or like a thief who has stolen treasure, and, hearing the cry
at his heels, scales a twenty foot wall with the agile gestures of a
madman. All the old-wives' and young men's club stories of everything
from broken engagements to the Generic and Proven Unfaithfulness of the
Female Sex brushed like dirty cobwebs for an instant across his mind.
They tightened about it like silk threads--a snaky web--and for one
scared instant he had a sense of being smothered in dusty feathers,
whispering together and saying, "When you're a little older and a great
deal wiser. When you've come to my age and know that all girls are
the same. When you realize that long engagements seldom mean marriage.
When--"

He put the cobwebs aside with a strain of will, for he was very tired in
body, and settled himself to write to Nancy. It was not the cobwebs that
hurt. The only thing that