"
"Dozens of them. And private rivers. Oh, I wish it were now."
Odd coincidence--he had just been wishing that very thing. They plunged
like divers into the dark eddying crowd and emerging in the cool fifties
sauntered indolently homeward, infinitely romantic to each other ...
both were walking alone in a dispassionate garden with a ghost found
in a dream.
Halcyon days like boats drifting along slow-moving rivers; spring
evenings full of a plaintive melancholy that made the past beautiful and
bitter, bidding them look back and see that the loves of other summers
long gone were dead with the forgotten waltzes of their years. Always
the most poignant moments were when some artificial barrier kept them
apart: in the theatre their hands would steal together, join, give and
return gentle pressures through the long dark; in crowded rooms they
would form words with their lips for each other's eyes--not knowing that
they were but following in the footsteps of dusty generations but
comprehending dimly that if truth is the end of life happiness is a mode
of it, to be cherished in its brief and tremulous moment. And then, one
fairy night, May became June.
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