I think the time is now--here in my garden--in the clear daylight of the young summer....

You have that last letter of my girlhood ?" "I burned it." "I have every letter you ever wrote me.

They are in my desk upstairs.
The desk is not locked." "Had you not better destroy them ?" "Why ?" "As you wish," he said, looking at the ground.
"One keeps the letters of the dead," she said; "your youth and mine"-- she made a little gesture downward as though smoothing a grave--daintily.
They were very unwise, sitting there in the sunshine side by side, tremendously impressed with the catastrophe of life and with each other--still young enough to be in earnest, to take life and each other with that awesome finality which is the dread privilege of youth.
She spoke with conviction of the mockery of life, of wisdom and its sadness; he looked upon the world in all the serious disillusion of youth, and saw it strewn with the fragments of their wrecked happiness.
They were very emotional, very unhappy, very, very much in love; but the truly pathetic part of it all lay in her innocent conviction that a marriage witnessed by the world was a sanctuary within the circle of which neither she nor he had any reason to fear each other or themselves.
The thing was done; hope slain.

They, the mourners, might now meet in safety to talk together over the dead--suffer together among the graves of common memories, sadly tracing, reverently marking with epitaphs appropriate the tombs which held the dead days of their youth.
Youth believes; Age is the sceptic.

So they did not know that, as nature abhors a vacuum, youth cannot long tolerate the vacuity of grief.