Page:Adams - A Child of the Age.djvu/152

140 It was no wonder she asked. Peal after peal of laughter, quenchless, re-echoing, came from me. The more I tried to stop it, the more it came. At last I stood still, exhausted, with my hands on my hips. But a glimpse of her face was enough to generate a fit of laughter as violent as the first.

We went on together somehow or other, I still shaking with this second fit, she solemn to a degree. All at once it struck me that she was a little afraid I was mad. And then came the task of appeasing her outraged sense of dignity. I was sorry, I said, to have laughed in this way. I explained that what had made me begin was the way she scampered over the Swallow Song …, and so on.

Her outraged sense of dignity took a good deal of appeasing, but I managed it in the end. Nay, I pleaded so hard, that I obtained from her a repetition of the Swallow Song, as we sat on that seat not far from the top of Primrose Hill, which I knew so well, so well, and she too remembered perhaps.

We parted at the door of No. 3 at about eleven. As I marched away down the Edgware Road, I went through the evening I had spent with her, ending at her grave bow of the head as I went back from her at the door with my hat down in my hand; but, going across the Park, other thoughts came to me, and I had lost sight of the evening I had spent with her when I reached home.

Here the Journal has a single entry:

'O Claire, Claire, that we should have met here in the time of eternity, and so parted! Claire, Claire! Oh, it is a vile devil's earth, and good is only in the slave. To have held thee in my arms, and, with my eyes in thine, to have kissed thee once, and died. Death were sweet so.—But it is useless to think. This city is a market where souls are pledged for bodies, and bodies for souls, and wealth buys all. I will go out from it. Useless to think, useless to think!'

It was a few days after this that Rosy and I went