The irony of it is that if he had cared _more_ for the poem than for the lady the sonnet would be only obvious, imitative rhetoric and no one would ever have read it after twenty years....
This was the last night Amory ever saw Eleanor.

He was leaving in the morning and they had agreed to take a long farewell trot by the cold moonlight.

She wanted to talk, she said--perhaps the last time in her life that she could be rational (she meant pose with comfort).

So they had turned into the woods and rode for half an hour with scarcely a word, except when she whispered "Damn!" at a bothersome branch--whispered it as no other girl was ever able to whisper it.

Then they started up Harper's Hill, walking their tired horses.
"Good Lord! It's quiet here!" whispered Eleanor; "much more lonesome than the woods." "I hate woods," Amory said, shuddering.