"
After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread their blankets
for the night.
"What a dream it was," Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. "How
strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fianc?©e!
"Under the stars," she repeated. "I never noticed the stars before. I
always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some
one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream,
all my youth."
"It _was_ a dream," said John quietly. "Everybody's youth is a
dream, a form of chemical madness."
"How pleasant then to be insane!"
"So I'm told," said John gloomily. "I don't know any longer. At any
rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a
form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only
diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of
disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing
of it." He shivered. "Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the
night's full of chill and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin
who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."
So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.
THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON
I
As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At
present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the
first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of
a hospital, preferably a fashionable one.
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