Read "Young People's Pride" by Stephen Vincent Benet online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The parti-colored harlequin and the young Chinese lady in blue silks are walking the Italian gardens, talking about nothing in particular. Ted has managed to discuss the moon -- it is high now, a round white lustre -- the night, which is warm -- the art of garden decoration, French, English and Italian -- the pleasantness of Southampton after New York -- all with great nervous fluency but so completely as if he had met Elinor for the first time ten minutes ago that she is beginning to wonder why, if he dislikes her as much as that, he ever suggested leaving the dance-floor at all.
Ted, meanwhile, is frantically conscious of the fact that they have reached the end of the garden, are turning back, and still he is so cripplingly tongue-tied about the only thing he really wishes to say that he cannot even get the words out to suggest their sitting down. It is not until he stumbles over a pebble while passing a small hard marble seat set back in a nest of hedge that he manages to make his first useful remark of the promenade.