“You do not look older; I am twenty. I like your face; you have gray eyes, so have I. I like your hair, too; it is dark and shines in the sun. What shall we talk about?”
“As we have begun.”
“Our ages?”
“Ourselves, rather.”
“I never talk about myself.”
“Why not?”
“I never have any one to talk to.”
The sense that he had passed back to childhood seized upon Gabriel with intense vividness. An artificial intellectuality appeared to have fallen from his being. The rust of experience no longer roughened his soul. He faced his deeper self, and the impression startled him. His manhood seemed to untrammel itself from the intricacies of world-wise philosophy; and he stood in the sun.
“You are lonely?” he said, with a sympathetic flexion of voice.
Her face brightened with a peculiarly luminous look, and her eyes held his.