To her her daughter went, coming behind her chair, put arms around her neck, laid a cheek against her mother's, and pressed it there in a dumb little caress. The poor woman, startled, half loosened the girl's arms, looked up. It seemed she understood. The overplus of love had touched her cheek. She looked searchingly, imploringly into her daughter's eyes; but evidently this was all there was to be told. Youth knew no more, perhaps, of its own tumultuous heart; knew, perhaps, but selfishly hugged the secret; hugged it, perhaps, not selfishly but with a deeper understanding than experience has of the one brief season in a whole life when man and woman are loosed from all expediency and advisability—from reason altogether—and snatch their moment alone in their small field of flowers among the bristling thorns of the world. Youth, overriding, sure of himself, and proud, scorned to call in experience; disdained to ask itself what it meant. The future to these two was as negligible as the past, or as the other souls living near them. They wanted to dream; to read each other's faces as open books, thousands of words on the pages, the same words a thousand times over; to float undisturbed on their tide of feeling; to gaze unaroused at their miracle; to ask, "How did we come together?" not "Where are we going?"
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