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 we don't arrive before I finish. Incidentally I've unbent and made a few acquaintances; it takes so much strategy to avoid people on a boat, and you can't read all day.

"How far had I got? Oh yes, to where we went in the house because it was too much like being lovers, being out in the garden. I don't know how to explain what that incident did for me. For one thing it kept me awake all night. Two minutes before I kissed Rhoda I had virtually accepted Things-as-they-are on a golden platter; two minutes after the kiss I was a man-who-makes-things-happen,—things that wouldn't have happened except by virtue of him. You may laugh at the triviality of the incident, but you can't laugh down its significance. All night I kept reliving that sudden flare-up in me, and seeing the change it wrought in Rhoda, as though I were someone she didn't really know. All my life, I kept thinking, I shall be surprising and shocking myself with spasmodic gestures that will sweep Things-as-they-are straight off the platter. There's something rebellious in me that will always refuse to conform to a given pattern, something that will insist on making a pattern for itself.

"I came down to breakfast a little crushed. In the morning light, eating berries on the porch and hearing drowsy drones and buzzes in the garden, it seemed to me that I wasn't such an energetic anarchist after all—but rather, a tired, flat, docile young man. Rhoda was