Think how you love me she whispered. I dont ask you to love me always like this but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me therell always be the person I am to-night.

...and for a moment I thought I loved her. But I am slow-thinking and full of interior rules that act as brakes on my desires.

I love her and thats the beginning and end of everything.

Actually thats my secret I cant even talk about you to anybody because I dont want any more people to know how wonderful you are.

Im not sentimental--Im as romantic as you are. The idea you knowis that the sentimental person thinks things will last--the romanticperson has a desperate confidence that they wont.

I wasnt actually in love but I felt a sort of tender curiosity.

I fell in love with her courage her sincerity and her flaming self respect. And its these things Id believe in even if the whole world indulged in wild suspicions that she wasnt all she should be. I love her and it is the beginning of everything.

It is youths felicity as well as its insufficiency that it can never live in the present but must always be measuring up the day against its own radiantly imagined futureflowers and gold girls and stars they are only prefigurations and prophecies of that incomparable unattainable young dream.

He found himself remembering how on one summer morning they two had started from New York in search of happiness. They had never expected to find it perhaps yet in itself that quest had been happier than anything he expected forevermore. Life it seemed must be a setting up of props around one - otherwise it was disaster. There was no rest no quiet. He had been futile in longing to drift and dream no one drifted except to maelstroms no one dreamed without his dreams becoming fantastic nightmares of indecision and regret.

Amory sorry for them was still not sorry for himself - art politics religion whatever his medium should be he knew he was safe now free from all hysteria - he could accept what was acceptable roam grow rebel sleep deep through many nights...There was no God in his heart he knew his ideas were still in riot there was ever the pain of memory the regret for his lost youth - yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul responsibility and a love of life the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams...And he could not tell why the struggle was worth while why he had determined to use to the utmost himself and his heritage from the personalities he had passed...He stretched out his arms to the crystalline radiant sky.I know myself he cried but that is all.