Emmet Roget, twenty, and Potter Osprey, nineteen, both juniors at the University, were sitting naked one afternoon on the long parapet which formed one of the banks of Milton’s abandoned quarry. Behind them the stone wall fell away a sheer twenty feet to the gulch below. In front, licking the tops of the three-foot barrier, lay the broad sheet of deep, clear water. Their white bodies dripped opaline flakes in the sunset. From time to time they shivered in the chilly late September wind.
A pale, luminous dory of a moon floated low in the delicately blue and pink expanse of sky that lay over the town. The surrounding flat country was infinitely still, infinitely peaceful.
Potter suddenly droned forth in the melancholy baritone the two affected when reading Swinburne and other modern poets:
“The wandering moon, an optimistic sprite
Etched a pale border ’round the face of night....”
Emmet was silent for a moment, and then as though the sound of the quotation had travelled to him from a distance, burst out:
“Gosh, man, where did you get that?”
The other reached over boisterously and clapped his friend’s shoulder.
“A trial of my own! All you need to be a poet is to suffer from insomnia, the way I did the other night.”
“Well, you can write.”