The fruit of youth or of the grape, the transitory magic of the brief passage from darkness to darkness - the old illusion that truth and beauty were… - F. Scott Fitzgerald

Rosemary felt that this swim would become the typical one of her life, the one that would always pop up in her memory at the mention of swimming.

As soon as I arrived I made an attempt to find my host but the two or three people of whom I asked his whereabouts stared at me in such an amazed way and denied so vehemently an knowledge of his movements that I slunk off in the direction of the cocktail table — the only place in the garden where a single man could linger without looking purposeless and alone.

And after reading Thoreau I felt how much I have lost by leaving nature out of my life.