Page:Glimpses of the Moon (Wharton 1922).djvu/30

20 "You mean: Nat and Grace may after all be having the best of it?"

"How can I say, when I've told you I see all the sides? Of course," Susy added hastily, "I couldn't live as they do for a week. But it's wonderful how little it's dimmed them."

"Certainly Nat was never more coruscating. And she keeps it up even better." He reflected. "We do them good, I daresay."

"Yes—or they us. I wonder which?"

After that, he seemed to remember that they sat a long time silent, and that his next utterance was a boyish outburst against the tyranny of the existing order of things, abruptly followed by the passionate query why, since he and she couldn't alter it, and since they both had the habit of looking at facts as they were, they wouldn't be utter fools not to take their chance of being happy in the only way that was open to them? To this challenge he did not recall Susy's making any definite answer; but after another interval, in which all the world seemed framed in a sudden kiss, he heard her murmur to herself in a brooding tone: "I don't suppose it's ever been tried before; but we might—." And then and there she had laid before him the very experiment they had since hazarded.

She would have none of surreptitious bliss, she began by declaring; and she set forth her reasons with her usual lucid impartiality. In the first place, she should have to marry some day, and