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remain a while feeling deeply, or at least trying to feel deeply.
    I returned to David, and asked him in a low voice whether he would give me a kiss.
    “Oh, don’t be tedious,” said David. For now was no time for romance or enthusiasm. As soon as the conversation reached a certain level he would murmur: “Oh, no dreams and utopias, please!” The sense of love stirred in him, the love one always feels for what one has lost, whether a child, a woman, or even pain. But instead of being down in the mouth with fear, he felt elated by it, living, as he did, in a deep, violent and finally organic belief in his lucky star. His life has been an attempt to realize the task of living poetically. Poor, ridiculous young man. “He has a lovely smile,” my mother liked to say. And David did some adorable things.
    Everybody is feeling a little more cheerful about everything to-day even though it is a dark and gloomy day.
    They danced at arm’s length, their teeth bared in hostility. They attacked one another with obscure allusions and had a silly quarrel. “Do you think,” he said to her, “that I might come and live with you in your house?”
    When it was quiet, she turned towards him with a guilty laugh. She hadn’t said, “Oh, yes, darling!” but it was understood.
    “What the hell are you laughin’ at?” he asked.
    “Do not talk nonsense,” said Eleanor, in a low tone. What if, for some one of the subtler reasons that would tell with both of them, they should tire of each other, misunderstand or irritate each other? She spoke amiably, yet with the least hint of dismissal in her voice. “Do you know how many men I’ve slept with the last two months?” Somehow she managed to look sleek and disheveled at the same time. It left her feeling slightly upset and annoyed, first with him and then with herself.
    He listened carefully, as always, putting in an appropriate word or two. “In future we’ll do our best to spare Mademoiselle’s nerves.” The night was full of an evil she didn’t seem aware of, and he had failed to exorcize.
    They were young and seemed to be in a bad mood, but at the time I felt they had sprung from a dream in which good and bad moods were no more than metaphysical accidents. One of the defects of my character is that I can never grow used to the plainness of people; however sweet a disposition a friend of mine may have, years of intimacy can never reconcile me to his bad teeth or lopsided nose: on the other hand I never cease to delight in his comeliness and after twenty years of familiarity I am still able to take pleasure in a well-shaped brow or the delicate line of a cheekbone.
    She spoke of his many manly virtues, and extolled the human qualities which made him a helper of the weak and frail, because he himself was weak and frail. Kindness personified; very capable; dapper through and through; antique-loving. “The trouble is, my dear, that he has not yet found the right woman.” She really knows how to exasperate me.
    They agreed on all points, and aroused each other to a ridiculous pitch of enthusiasm over nothing in particular.
    “And now you are going to have a change,” said Eleanor, with a condoning smile and a sense of relief, as solemn spirits on seriously joyful occasions affected her as they did most people. One of the three silver rings she wears is taloned, like an obscure torture implement.
    “Just like a mother,” he said. She is nothing but sexuality; she is sexuality itself. He withdraws again, nibbles her ear, moves to her neck and traces, with his tongue, the exposed part of her chest.
    Then there was silence; and a cow coughed; and that led her to say how odd it was, as a child, she had never feared cows, only horses. “That’s why I always like Englishmen.”
    “Amen,” sang David fervently, looking as if he had just come down from an Italian picture of singing angels. Not knowing what to say, he accented his awkwardness, playing the inoffensive fool.
    He