§ 123
But any two ardent mountain climbers are practically certain to arrive at the top, whether they get there together or the man goes ahead and waits for his lady to come up herself—with the help of another man. For the mountain of which I speak has the peculiarity that no woman can climb alone to the top, as the path is extremely narrow, precipitous and dangerous. If her husband leaves her as they approach the peak (which is an enormous hill of rock capped by one huge boulder), she will be forced to wait until he feels energetic enough to descend a couple of hundred feet or so and help her up. Or if, enchanted himself by the glorious view—miles and miles of rolling country, numerous lakes and the silver ribbon of the Atlantic Ocean nearly eighty miles away—he is absorbed in his own sensations of grandeur, and forgets his wife down there below him as so many men do, it is just possible that another more unselfish and less uncontrolled man will give her his hand and help her to the top, slowly and courteously as behooves a man to do in spite of her effusive protestations to him to leave her and see the sunrise himself from the mountain top.
How will the husband of this woman feel, if, standing and facing the east, he suddenly realizes that there appears his own wife over the edge of the boulder, lifted by the strength of another man?
Had he known the true etiquette of mountain climbing among true married lovers, he would have waited until both had covered together the entire ascent up to the base of the boulder, six feet high and twenty in diameter; and then, making a foot rest for her with his two hands, he would have assisted her to get on this pinnacle herself first, before he did.
Then he would have watched her face for full five minutes in its varying lights as she turned about in ecstasy at the sublime panorama, the sunlight falling on her cheeks with their heightened colour from her climb, the wind blowing a lock of hair across her temple. He would have enjoyed for a while her outcry of delight as she saw and recognized the miniature presentment of now a familiar village, now a lake, before he jumped up beside her, clasped her in his arms and both turned about from north to east to south to west together, and together drank in the vitalizing air. He would be infinitely better able to tell her what to look at, than he was able when he was on the boulder and she two hundred feet below, to shout to her that he could see a hundred miles in every direction.
And now he need not shout. He can whisper in her ears, between kisses on every part of her head and neck, the joy of both of them, and can listen to her murmuring endearments she never otherwise would have thought of uttering.