He rolled over on the grass and played with her hand.
"How could you love and cuddle a ghost?"
"No doubt you could love it. I don't suppose you could cuddle it. You wouldn't want to."
"No—that's true, Sabina. If this cliff carried away this moment, and we were both smashed to pulp and arrived together in another world without any clothes and both horribly down on our luck—but it's too ghastly a picture. I should howl all through eternity—to think what I'd missed."
They talked nonsense, played with their thoughts and came nearer and nearer together. One tremendous and masterful impulse drew them on—a raging hunger and thirst on his part and something not widely different on hers. Again and again they caught themselves in each other's arms, then broke off, grew serious and strove to steady the trend of their desires.
Golden Cap was a lonely spot and few visited it that day. Once a middle-aged man and woman surprised them where they sat behind a rock near the edge of the great precipices. The man had grown warm and mopped his face and let the wind cool it.
He was ugly, clumsily built, and displayed large calves in knickerbockers and a hot, bald head.
"How hideous human beings can be," said Raymond after they had gone.
"He wasn't hideous in his wife's eyes, I expect."
"Middle-age is mercifully blind no doubt to its own horrors," he said. "You can respect and even admire old age, like other ruins, if it's picturesque, but middle-age is deadly always."