Lake water gurgled at the shore, and she thought it might be going down a drain, somewhere, the way time goes down a drain; although time goes silently.
She closed her eyes, trying to think, but she found only the eternal confusion in her mind; and the wind carried back some of her own sweet perfume smell to her, half sickening her. She licked her lips nervously, and her cheeks were hot.
"We'll get married and have our own home, and you can...."
She shrank away from him mentally; and looking at him, filtered by moonlight, she saw that he was old and although the aspen leaf that fell between them was still green, she knew that it was old and dead, too, and the grass under her left hand, though green, was dying. Terror filled her, and as a very small child, she had been in a dark room, somewhere, and there was rain and lightning; her father had come to hold her hand; she could remember his saying: "You won't die for a long time," although how he had come to say it, she could not remember. Ever since, she had, in the back of her mind, the thought: I'm dying now. And late at night, very often, she would awake with icy sweat on her body to realize that some day there would actually come that last minute, as real as the present one, and how could she stand it?
"... the house," he finished; but she did not know what he had said.
"We don't have to get married," she said.
"Why not? I don't see why not?"
Her lips were trembling, and she wanted to cry. "Don't you see: I don't want to."
"I don't understand you," he said. "I don't understand you at all."