It is the man and the woman to whom the act remains, each time, as fresh and
beautiful, as it was the first time, who are able to sustain and perpetuate their first sense
of its glory in the midst
of the sober or bleak or sordid realities
of day to day life, and who can
feel, afresh each time, a boundless
gratitude for each other and for this blessed source
of sweetness and strength — it is they who are the truly «virgin», the truly pure and chaste; and (on the Humanist hypothesis) it is they who are the remnant selected by grace to be the true and spiritual seed
of the risen Christ.33
He
feels sincere
gratitude to his cousin and childhood friend, Charlie, for an invitation to spend the summer with him and his wife, Chloe, at their
beautiful house in the mountains
of New York State.