“S-s-sh!” he cautioned. “That Jap driver is a high-school graduate and knows more English than either of us. Also, I think he is a spy for his Government. So why should we tell him anything? Besides, I was so very young. You remember . . . ”
“Your cheeks were like the peaches we used to grow before the Mediterranean fruit fly got into them,” Alice agreed. “I don’t think you shaved more than once a week then. You were a pretty boy. Don’t you remember the hula we composed in your honour, the—”
“S-s-sh!” he hushed her. “All that’s buried and forgotten. May it remain forgotten.”
And she was aware that in his eyes was no longer any of the ingenuousness of youth she remembered. Instead, his eyes were keen and speculative, searching into her for some assurance that she would not resurrect his particular portion of that buried past.
“Religion is a good thing for us as we get along into middle age,” another old friend told her. He was building a magnificent house on Pacific Heights, but had recently married a second time, and was even then on his way to the steamer to welcome home his two daughters just graduated from Vassar. “We need religion in our old age, Alice. It softens, makes us more tolerant and forgiving of the weaknesses of others—especially the weaknesses of youth of—of others, when they played high and low and didn’t know what they were doing.”
He waited anxiously.
“Yes,” she said. “We are all born to sin and it is hard to grow out of sin. But I grow, I grow.”
“Don’t forget, Alice, in those other days I always played square. You and I never had a falling out.”
“Not even the night you gave that luau when you were twenty-one and insisted on breaking the glassware after every toast. But of course you paid for it.”
“Handsomely,” he asserted almost pleadingly.