Page:Later Life (1919).djvu/335

Rh and not in a narrow ring of convention, not in terror of people and what they may think absurd and cannot understand. . . and. . . and. . ."

"And . . . ?" he asked.

"And . . . in that thought, in that hope . . . I had forgotten my boy. And yet he is the reality!"

"And yet he . . . is the reality."

"And now I am sacrificing . . . the dream . . . the illusion ... to him."

"Yes . . . the dream . . . the illusion," he said, with a smile that was full of pain.

"It hurts me!" she confessed, with a sob. "Yesterday—oh, only yesterday, last night!—I thought that the dream, the illusion . . . was truth . . . But what for young people can be a dream, an illusion . . . which comes true . . ."

"Is at our age . . ."

"Absurd?" she asked, still wavering.

"Not absurd perhaps . . . but impossible. We go bent under too heavy a burden of the past to permit ourselves youthful dreams and illusions. We no longer have any right . . . even to memories . . ."

"I have some . . . from my childhood," she stammered, vaguely.

"There are no memories left for us," he said, gently, with his smile that was full of pain.

"No, there are none left for us," she repeated.