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Chapter Nine

"Would you like to play bridge with the Prestons, Christabel?"

"Curtis darling! Play bridge, with the sea and the sky looking like this?"

"Well, what would you like to do?"

"Dearest, must we do something all the time? Can't we just be?"

So for a few minutes they just were. How blue the sea is! she thought. How utterly it satisfies me! She looked toward Curtis to see if he were drinking it in, too. His eyes were shut, his mouth a little open.

Why was I such a fool as to think there could never be anything for me but loneliness? What is life, anyway, but just being alone, never really touching each other, except in those rare moments when a shared beauty, a shared reality, opens the prison doors? How I long to share with him this rapture of really