He wanted to keep the tree without ornaments, realize fully the direction and momentum of this new start.
***** The afternoon waned from the purging good of three o'clock to the golden beauty of four.

Afterward he walked through the dull ache of a setting sun when even the clouds seemed bleeding and at twilight he came to a graveyard.

There was a dusky, dreamy smell of flowers and the ghost of a new moon in the sky and shadows everywhere.

On an impulse he considered trying to open the door of a rusty iron vault built into the side of a hill; a vault washed clean and covered with late-blooming, weepy watery-blue flowers that might have grown from dead eyes, sticky to the touch with a sickening odor.
Amory wanted to feel "William Dayfield, 1864." He wondered that graves ever made people consider life in vain.

Somehow he could find nothing hopeless in having lived.