And Now Good-bye by James Hilton — Read

In the taxi he began to wonder what was really happening, and after musing for a time a word occurred to him, a rather astonishing word, he thought, but so definitely the right one that he did not seek for any other. It was all a 'lark'. It was quite the most gigantic lark he had ever had; but then, in fact, his life up to the present had been somewhat deficient in larks of any kind. And it was good for him, he felt, or at any rate, not bad for him, to indulge in such an occasional escapade. Dinner, talk, music--what could be more harmless? After all, he reflected, he had something to celebrate as well as she.

Besides, like all the best larks--perhaps it was what made them the best--it was all to be such a transient thing. To-morrow she would be abroad, to-morrow he would be in Browdley, and possibly, indeed probably, they would never see each other again. She would have those hours and hours of fiddle practice that she longed for, and he would be back in his little world of guild meetings and chapel services, good works and bad cooking. He saw, with a certain grim relish, the years stretching ahead of him; viewed in mind from the dark recesses of a taxi after a good dinner they seemed to reflect, mirror-like, something of that queer quality in the present-which could only be indicated by that same word--a. 'lark'. After all, the spirit of fun, of adventure, of enterprise, was surely not to be confined to a single place or occasion. Why should there not be adventure in Browdley? He felt, with conviction, that he would be all the better for this London 'night-out' when he got home; it had been a revelation of something he had so far rather missed--the joy of life, that unreasonable and illogical human joy that made a man buy what he could not afford and drink (for once) against his convictions and progress to sudden enchanting intimacy with someone whose very charm, perhaps, lay partly in the unlikelihood of any further meeting.