undertaker's list of Penniless Authors' Brides. But it worries mother--and
that worries me--and I wish she wouldn't. Forgive me, Ollie--and then
that Richardson complex of mother's came up again--"

"Waiting hurts, naturally,--and I'm the person who used to wonder about
girls making such a fuss about how soon they got married--but, then, Ollie,
of course, I never really wanted to get married before myself and somehow
that seems to make a difference. But that's the way things go--and the only
thing I wish is that I was the only person to be hurt. We will, sooner or
later, and it will be all the better for our not having grabbed at once--at
least that's what all the old people with no emotions left are always so
anxious to tell you. But they talk about it as if anybody under thirty-five
who wanted to get married was acting like a three-year-old stealing
jam--and that's annoying. And anyhow, it wouldn't be bad, if I weren't so
silly, I suppose--"

"Waiting hurts, naturally," and that casual sentence made him chilly
afraid. For to be in love, though it may force the lover to actions of
impossible courage does not make him in the least courageous of himself,
but only drives him by the one large fear of losing this love like a
soldier pricked from behind by a bayonet over the bodies of smaller fears,
or like a thief who has stolen treasure, and, hearing the cry at his heels,
scales a twenty foot wall with the agile gestures of a madman. All the
old-wives' and young men's club stories of everything from broken
engagements to the Generic and Proven Unfaithfulness of the Female Sex
brushed like dirty cobwebs for an instant across his mind. They tightened
about it like silk threads--a snaky web--and for one scared instant he
had a sense of being smothered in dusty feathers, whispering together and
saying, "When you're a little older and a great deal wiser. When you've
come to my age and know that all girls are the same. When you realize that