"A matter of taste! Every fibre of me rebels at the thought of death—of inflicting it on anything. God knows how I could have done it when I had so much of happiness myself!" She swung around toward him:
"Sooner or later what remains to say between us must be said, Garry. I think the time is now—here in my garden—in the clear daylight of the young summer.... You have that last letter of my girlhood?"
"I burned it."
"I have every letter you ever wrote me. They are in my desk upstairs. The desk is not locked."
"Had you not better destroy them?"
"Why?"
"As you wish," he said, looking at the ground.
"One keeps the letters of the dead," she said; "your youth and mine"—she made a little gesture downward as though smoothing a grave—daintily.
They were very unwise, sitting there in the sunshine side by side, tremendously impressed with the catastrophe of life and with each other—still young enough to be in earnest, to take life and each other with that awesome finality which is the dread privilege of youth.
She spoke with conviction of the mockery of life, of wisdom and its sadness; he looked upon the world in all the serious disillusion of youth, and saw it strewn with the fragments of their wrecked happiness.