‘You shan’t go, Hugo,’ I was saying. ‘I won’t let them. . . . They mustn’t do it.’
Hugo shook his head.
‘It is no good, Helen,’ he said. ‘I shall have to go. I don’t want to. I am afraid of it—and nothing will ever be the same any more.’
I thought he was crying, but he wasn’t, for he sat up then and looked at me.
His face was quite white and his eyes that were always big and dark looked bigger and darker. His whole face looked pinched and tragic as though he saw and understood so much beyond this one thing.
And I realized suddenly, for the first time, the relentlessness of time and the inevitability of change. I understood that I could not resist, and what that meant.
Something was passing, a door was closing, and nothing in the world could hold it open. Hugo was helpless, and I was helpless; and every one. We could not stand still and we could not go back; and what we had had, we could never have again.
I shut my eyes very tight and tried to understand, and a queer feeling came over me that in one moment more I would understand everything—the secret of life and the universe—something unutterably splendid and complete, but the moment passed, the secret receded. It had gone, and I could not grasp it; only the sense of helplessness remained, and of inevitability.
‘Is this growing up?’ I asked Hugo.
And he nodded.