Page:Many inventions (IA manyinventions00kipliala).pdf/143

 photograph of a girl with a curly head, and a foolish slack mouth,

'Isn't it—isn't it wonderful?' le whispered, pink to the tips of his.ears, wrapped in the rosy mystery of first love. 'I didn't know; I didn't think—it came like a thunderelap.'

'Yes. It comes like a thunderclap. Are yon very happy, Charlie?'

'My God—she—she loves me!' He sat down repeating the last words to himself. 1 looked at the hairless face, the narrow shoulders already bowed by desk-work, and wondered when, where, and how 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 and most beautiful wooings. Were this 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.