home. Neither was ever in love with a young man unless he and she were verbally very near: that is unless they were profoundly interested, TALKING to one another. The amazing, the profound, the unbelievable thrill there was in passionately talking to some really clever young man by the hour, resuming day after day for months… this they had never realized till it happened! The paradisal promise: Thou shalt have men to talk to!—had never been uttered. It was fulfilled before they knew what a promise it was.

战火燃起，姐妹俩匆匆赶回家，而在此之前，两人都已有过恋爱的经验。陷入爱河，皆因双方能够倾心交谈，彼此深有好感，愿意互诉衷肠。数月间，能与颖悟绝伦的少男时以继时，日以继日地忘情交谈，那种兴奋的感受真是美妙至极、深奥莫测、难以置信……而这些只有在亲身经历过后，才能真正认识得到。神的许诺：尔将交到可以交心的男子！——从未透露，这个许诺却在恋人们尚未知晓之前，就已兑现。

And if after the roused intimacy of these vivid and soul-enlightened discussions the sex thing became more or less inevitable, then let it. It marked the end of a chapter. It had a thrill of its own too: a queer vibrating thrill inside the body, a final spasm of self-assertion, like the last word, exciting, and very like the row of asterisks that can be put to show the end of a paragraph, and a break in the theme.

生动的、启迪灵魂的交谈，使恋人间的关系变得亲昵，若此时云情雨意已无法抑制，那就不妨顺其自然。这标志着一个篇章的终结。其本身也伴随着强烈的快感：肉体深处莫可名状的震颤，最终释放欲望时的痉挛，像是文章末尾激奋人心的字眼，更像是段落结尾处一连串的星号，预示着主题思想戛然而止。

When the girls came home for the summer holidays of 1913, when Hilda was twenty and Connie eighteen, their father could see plainly that they had had the love experience.

适逢1913年暑期，姐妹俩返回故乡，那时希尔达20岁，康妮18岁，其父一眼便看出她们已经有了爱情经验。

L'amour avait possé par là, as somebody puts it. But he was a man of experience himself, and let life take its course. As for the mother, a nervous invalid in the last few months of her life, she wanted her girls to be "free", and to "fulfil themselves". She herself had never been able to be altogether herself: it had been denied her. Heaven knows why, for she was a woman who had her own income and her own way. She blamed her husband. But as a matter of fact, it was some old impression of authority on her own