The moonlight patterned the ground.
"Look," he said. "We want to hurry and grow up, don't we? We want...."
Scarcely understanding, herself, she repeated, "We don't have to get married!" Her mouth was dry, and her hand, hot in his.
Doggedly, Clyde said, "I don't understand you, Margy."
She laughed tiredly, for he was gone, and it was almost too late, now. "Don't be serious. Tonight, don't be serious. Let's not talk any more about that. I don't want to talk about that."
"We've got to," he insisted. "We've got to learn to be serious. We can't go on like a couple of kids like this forever."
"There's ... there's a lot of time, yet. We've got so much time ... before we...." She wondered how the thought had almost crept into words, and she shuddered, while from across the lake, a tree frog began to chirp eerily. "I'm afraid to think about dying," she said, and it was the most important thing in the world to make him understand that. "Dying worries me. I don't want to have to die." Her voice went on evenly, monotonously, in chorus with the tree frog, and her hand clamped his wetly, but she hardly listened to the words herself, because she knew that he did not understand what she was saying. "But I don't have to think about it. There's so much time left. And I want to stay young like this. Don't you understand, Clyde? I thought you said you understood me? I don't want to be sick and hurt. I want things to be simple and ... pretty. Pretty. Can't you see that, Clyde? I don't care about anything else."
"You don't believe that," he said.
After a pause (while the wind quieted), she said, insistently, "I do. Yes, I do, Clyde ... I really do."