"
"Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are you very happy, Charlie?"
"My God--she--she loves me!" He sat down repeating the last words to himself.
I looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already bowed by desk-
work, and wondered when, where, and bow he had loved in his past lives.
"What will your mother say?" I asked, cheerfully.
"I don't care a damn what she says."
At twenty the things for which one does not care a damn should, properly, be
many, but one must not include mothers in the list. I told him this gently;
and he described Her, even as Adam must have described to the newly named
beasts the glory and tenderness and beauty of Eve. Incidentally I learned that
She was a tobacconist's assistant with a weakness for pretty dress, and had
told him four or five times already that She had never been kissed by a man
before.
Charlie spoke on, and on, and on; while I, separated from him by thousands of
years, was considering the beginnings of things. Now I understood why the
Lords of Life and Death shut the doors so carefully behind us. It is that we
may not remember our first wooings. Were it not so, our world would be without
inhabitants in a hundred years.
"Now, about that galley-story," I said, still more cheerfully, in a pause in
the rush of the speech.
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