"Precisely. As it might be you and me.... What we're doing is horribly typical, Kitty. Don't let's ever blind ourselves to its nature. We'll do it, because we think it's worth it; but we'll do it with our eyes open. Thank heaven we're both clear-headed and hard-headed enough to know what we're doing and not to muddle ourselves with cant about it.... That's one of the things that I suppose, I love you for, my dear—your clear-headedness. You never muddle or cant or sentimentalise. You're hard-headed and clear-eyed."
"In fact, cynical," said Kitty.
"Yes. Rather cynical. Unnecessarily cynical, I think. You could do with some more faith."
"Perhaps I shall catch some from you. You've got lots, haven't you? As the husband is the wife is; I am mated to, etc.... And you're a lot cleverer than I am, so you're most likely right.... We're awfully different, Nicky, my love, aren't we?"
"No doubt we are. Who isn't?"
For a while they lay silent in the warm sweetness of the hill-top, while the golden light slipped from them, leaving behind it the pure green stillness of the evening; and they looked at one another and speculated on the strange differences of human beings each from each, and the mystery of personality, that tiny point on to which all the age-long accumulated forces of heredity press, so that you would suppose that the world itself could not contain them, and yet they are contained in one small, ordinary soul, which does not break under the weight.
So they looked at one another, speculating, until speculation faded into seeing, and instead of personalities they became to one another persons, and Chester saw Kitty red-lipped and golden-eyed and black-lashed and tanned a smooth nut-brown by sun and sea, and Kitty saw Chester long and lean and sallow, with black brows bent over deep, keen, dreaming eyes, and lips carrying their queer suggestion of tragedy and comedy.
"Isn't it fun," said Kitty, "that you are you and I am I? I think it must be (don't you?) the greatest fun that ever was since the world began. That's what I think ... and everywhere millions of people are thinking exactly the same. We're part of the common herd, Nicky—the very, very commonest herd of all herds. I think I like it rather—being so common, I mean. It's amusing. Don't you?"
"Yes," he said, and smiled at her. "I think I do."
Still they lay there, side by side, in the extraordinary hushed sweetness of the evening. Kitty's cheek was pressed against short warm grass. Close to her ear a cicale chirped, monotonously bright; far off, from every hill, the frogs began their evening singing.