They lingered together still, she neglecting her
office--for from the moment he was so clever she had no proper
right to him--and both neglecting the house, just waiting as to see
if a memory or two more wouldn't again breathe on them. It hadn't
taken them many minutes, after all, to put down on the table, like
the cards of a pack, those that constituted their respective hands;
only what came out was that the pack was unfortunately not perfect-
-that the past, invoked, invited, encouraged, could give them,
naturally, no more than it had. It had made them anciently meet--
her at twenty, him at twenty-five; but nothing was so strange, they
seemed to say to each other, as that, while so occupied, it hadn't
done a little more for them. They looked at each other as with the
feeling of an occasion missed; the present would have been so much
better if the other, in the far distance, in the foreign land,
hadn't been so stupidly meagre. There weren't, apparently, all
counted, more than a dozen little old things that had succeeded in
coming to pass between them; trivialities of youth, simplicities of
freshness, stupidities of ignorance, small possible germs, but too
deeply buried--too deeply (didn't it seem?) to sprout after so many
years.
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