The thought came to David that he would have preferred her saying: “No one except me.” But it was plain these two hunted together. David found it hard to understand their likeness.
“Children! Children! Come now. We’re going.” The voice of Mrs. Tibbetts strode through the house. Duer was the quickest to respond.
David and Lois were alone.
The brief packed hour had stirred the early world of David, had made it glow again. Their spirits had been high together. Now, somehow, they sat in gloom. They realized that in their lightness there had been combat. Looking at each other, they felt the burden of those below advancing heavily upon them.
“Why do you love Fay so much?”
“Because she’s a dear.” Lois was not on the defensive because of Fay. She had more intelligence than her answer. She deemed the question worthy of no better. She sought the solace of a different subject.
David kept silent, and looked at Lois and thought of Fay.
He saw Fay quite clearly. Fay was dark, regular of feature, beautiful even. Her face was hard. It had none of the free loveliness of sixteen years. It roused in David passion more nearly than affection, the need to dominate rather than to help. David saw her straight mouth, her veiled eyes, the squareness of her forehead: he tried to remember that she had laughed and joked with Lois, was delightful snubbing her solemn brother. Her lively brightness seemed strange to her immobile face.
“Besides, Lois is her chum, and look at Lois!” he argued with himself and he looked. He knew that her tenderness was like an early yellow violet. He set aside his first forbidding instinct about Fay. He forgot it, altogether....
In contemplation of each other, these two were like two worlds, each with its atmosphere and its teeming life and its fires, each with its intense exclusive consciousness, thrust suddenly close out of the silences of Space. They felt the indefeasible Past that summed their difference: its involute progression of separate thought and deed reaching from the mist of their beginnings. They were separate: Nothing was between them. Yet they were being drawn together.