“How can we go back twenty years?”
“By wiping out two hundred and forty unimportant months from our memories.”
She glanced up at him and shook her head. It was the grey and barren waste of those two hundred and forty months that formed the impassable barrier. In order to pick up the thread of that last talk it would be necessary to recapture the grace of those brief and exquisite moments.
“If we are to be friends,” she said, “we must start afresh. All that—that foolishness has been dead and buried long ago.”
“Buried, perhaps—or, rather, hidden away in a Sleeping Beauty sort of trance. But dead? Not a bit of it. It has been healthily alive all the time, and now—a magic touch—and it has reawakened strong and beautiful as ever.”
“It’s very easy to play with words and metaphors and analogies. You can make them appear to prove anything. As a matter of fact, we’ve both been subjected to the organic changes of twenty years. I can no more become the girl of eighteen than I can become the child of eight or the baby eight months old.”
Baltazar put his hands in his pockets, laughed, turned away, and sat down again in his chair.
“We seem to have got on to the basis of a nice and interminable discussion. Let us get off it for the present. We have plenty of time. If I’m anything at all, I’m a man of illimitable patience.”
She laughed out loud. She could not help it. A typhoon proclaiming its Zephyrdom! And proclaiming it not jestingly, but with the accent of deeply rooted conviction.
“You? You patient? Oh, my dear——”