"It's what people always call a 'happy release,'" said Henry. "It really has been awful for her these last years. When I went up to see her a few weeks ago her eyes were terrible."
"Poor mother," Millie repeated again. They were silent for a little, then Millie said: "You know, I've been thinking all the evening what Peter once said to us about our being enchanted—because we are young. There's something awfully true about it. When things are at their very worst—when I'm having the most awful row with Bunny or Victoria's more tiresome than you can imagine—although I say to myself, 'I'm perfectly miserable,' I'm not really because there's something behind it all that I'm enjoying hugely. I wouldn't miss a moment of it. I want every scrap. It is like an enchantment really. I suppose I'll wake up soon."
Henry nodded.
"I feel it too. And I feel as though it must all have its climax in some wonderful adventure that's coming to me. An adventure that I shall remember all the rest of my life. It seems silly, after the War, talking of adventures, but the War was too awful for one to dare to talk about oneself in connection with it, although it was immensely personal all the time. But we're out of the War now and back in life again, and if I can keep that sense of magic I have now, nothing can hurt me. The whole of life will be an adventure."
"We must keep it," said Millie. "We must remember we had it. And when we get ever so old and dusty and rheumatic we can say: 'Anyway we knew what life was once.'"
"Yes, I know," said Henry. "And be one of those people who say to their children and other people's children if they haven't any of their own: 'Ah, my dear, there's nothing like being young. My school-days were the happiest.' Rot! as though most people's school-time wasn't damnable."
"Oh it's nothing to do with age," said Millie scornfully. "The enchanted people are any age, but they're always young. The only point about them is that they're the only people who really know what life is. All the others are wrong."
"We're talking terribly like the virtuous people in books," said Henry. "You know, books like Seymour's, all about Courage and Tolerance and all the other things with capital letters. Why is it that when a Russian or Scandinavian talks about life it sounds perfectly natural and that when an Englishman does it's false and priggish?"
"I'm sure I don't know," said Millie in an absent-minded voice. "Isn't the house quiet? And isn't it cold? . . . Poor mother! It's so horrid being not able to do anything. Katherine's feeling it terribly. She's longing for her to say just one word."
"She won't," said Henry. "She'll hold out to the very last."