into the river's broad
current, Walter stopped and whispered, "I wish we could go swimming."

"I wish we could--it's quite warm," she said, prosaically.

But river and dark woods and breeze overhead seemed to whisper to
her--whisper, whisper, all the shrouded night aquiver with low, eager
whispers. She shivered to find herself imagining the unimaginable--that
she might throw off her stodgy office clothes, her dull cloth skirt and
neat blouse, and go swimming beside him, revel in giving herself up to
the utter frankness of cool water laving her bare flesh.

She closed her mind. She did not condemn herself for wanting to bathe as
Mother Eve had bathed, naked and unafraid. She did not condemn
herself--but neither did she excuse. She was simply afraid. She dared
not try to make new standards; she took refuge in the old standards of
the good little Una. Though all about her called the enticing voices of
night and the river, yet she listened for the tried counsel voices of
the plain Panama streets and the busy office.

While she struggled, Walter stood with his arm fitted about her
shoulder, letting the pregnant silence speak, till again he insisted:
"Why couldn't we go swimming?" Then, with all the cruelly urgent lovers
of the days of hungry poetry: "We're going to let youth go by and never
dare to be mad. Time will get us--we'll be old--it will be too late to
enjoy being mad." His lyric cry dropped to a small-boy excuse: "Besides,
it wouldn't hurt.... Come on. Think of plunging in."

"No, no, no, no!" she cried, and ran from him up the jetty, back to the
path.... She was not afraid of him, because she was so much more afraid
of herself.

He followed sullenly as the path led them farther and farther. She
stopped on a rise, and found herself able to say, calmly, "Don't you
think we'd better go back now?"

"Maybe we ought to. But sit down here."

He hunched up his knees, rested his elbows on them, and said,
abstractedly, apparently talking to himself as much as to her:

"I'm sorry I've been so grouchy coming down the path. But I _don't_
apologize for wanting us to go swimming. Civilization, the world's
office-manager, tells us to work like fiends all day and be lonely and
respectable all evening, and not even marry till we're thirty, because
we can't afford to! That's all right for them as likes to become nice
varnished desks, but not for me! I'm going to hunger and thirst and
satisfy my appetites--even if it makes