Perhaps twenty-four. She can't be any more than that."
He kissed her fiercely, as though through her lips he would impress her mind with the total irrelevance of comparative ages.
They talked. Or rather, Yvonne talked. Jock sat silent, looking into her eyes. You could write a book from the things in Yvonne's eyes. "Remembered loves," he speculated. "Lost twilights. Music, and wisdom, and sun and shadow, and pain." . . . He held her hands. He laid them flat against his, and folded them into fists and chuckled over their littleness, and buried his nose in their perfumed palms. . . . She had classic hands. Narrow artistic fingers, and a thumb that could be pulled backward until it formed a pinkish-white arch. . . . He stroked, her hair. Queer, about her hair. Sometimes it was bobbed, and at other times you were sure it wasn't. She fixed it in so many ways, all of them enchantingly becoming.
His mind was too full of her to concentrate on the impersonal things she was saying. But presently he heard, "—because I'm going away tomorrow"
He sat up with a start. "You're what?"
"I'm going away tomorrow."
"You're not!"
"Yes I am. I'm going to California."
"For how long," he groaned.
"Oh—I don't know exactly. Several months, I suppose."
Several months! Several—months! Jock felt joy ride out of him on those two words like a fairy princess on horseback, leaving only an ache and an emptiness. Several months. . . .
"And do you care so much, Jock Hamill?"
