The woman had seen it and had advised him to go home.
Yet the plea was curiously irksome, though it gave him the excuse he needed.

If you played at being young, you had to take up the obligations of youth, and he thought derisively of his boyish exhilaration of the past days.

Derisively, but also sadly.

What had become of that innocent joviality he had dreamed of, that happy morning pilgrimage of Spring enlivened by tags from the poets?
His goddess had played him false.

Romance had put upon him too hard a trial.
He lay long awake, torn between common sense and a desire to be loyal to some vague whimsical standard.