"I can't understand it."
"Can't understand what?"
"The fascination I had for you."
He closed the book and laid it down.
"You were my youth, Nina."
He held out his hands toward her, the hands that he had just now withdrawn. She would have taken them, but for the look in his eyes that forbade her to touch him.
"My youth was dumb. It couldn't make itself immortal. You did that for it."
"But the people of those tales are not a bit like you."
"No. They are me. They are what I was. Your people are not people, they are not characters, they are incarnate passions."
"So like you," she said, with a resurgence of her irony.