What he said, his attitude toward life, toward her, toward himself, were all reflexes of the dead Englishman's literary moods.
Often she sat in the grass, a lazy wind playing with her short hair, her voice husky as she ran up and down the scale from Grantchester to Waikiki.

There was something most passionate in Eleanor's reading aloud.
They seemed nearer, not only mentally, but physically, when they read, than when she was in his arms, and this was often, for they fell half into love almost from the first.

Yet was Amory capable of love now?
He could, as always, run through the emotions in a half hour, but even while they revelled in their imaginations, he knew that neither of them could care as he had cared once before--I suppose that was why they turned to Brooke, and Swinburne, and Shelley.

Their chance was to make everything fine and finished and rich and imaginative; they must bend tiny golden tentacles from his imagination to hers, that would take the place of the great, deep love that was never so near, yet never so much of a dream.
One poem they read over and over; Swinburne's "Triumph of Time," and four lines of it rang in his memory afterward on warm nights when he saw the fireflies among dusky tree trunks and heard the low drone of many frogs.

Then Eleanor seemed to come out of the night and stand by him, and he heard her throaty voice, with its tone of a fleecy-headed drum, repeating: "Is it worth a tear, is it worth an hour, To think of things that are well outworn; Of fruitless husk and fugitive flower, The dream foregone and the deed foreborne ?" They were formally introduced two days later, and his aunt told him her history.