Time plays an essential part in our mortality, and suddenly for no reason he could imagine (or admit) the image of Peg laughing filled his mind -- so desirable, so lusty, so full of nuances of pleasure and joy. He drove sensual patterns off, carefully shaving his long upper lip. It is harder, he muttered, to meditate on man (or woman) than on God.

David finished shaving, washed his face clean of lather, and combed and retied his hair. He was proud that he had never worn a wig. More and more of the colonials were wearing their own hair and not using powder. He felt cheerful again, refreshed; presentable in his wide-cut brown suit, the well-made riding boots.

It is so easy to falsify sentiment. In the meadow below, militia officers shouted at their men and on King's Bridge two boys sat fishing. The future would happen; he did not have to hurry it by thinking too much. A man could be tossed outside the dimension of time by a stray bullet these days. He began to pack the saddlebags. And all this too shall pass away: it came to him out of some dim corner of memory from a church service when he was a boy -- yes, in a white church with a thin spur steeple in the patriarchal Hudson Valley, where a feeling of plenitude was normal in those English Dutch manors with their well-fed squires.