He was young, and to many people the very image of the handsome American, the gilded youth; yet all he wanted himself was affection, a true friend, a companion to assuage the loss of what he sentimentally saw as his lost youth (he hardly could know how we extend our youths at the end of each succeeding decade, like a man postponing payment on a loan), and in this state—of melancholy despair, poignant sensitivity to the sensual, romantic aspects of life: green courtyards, bluffs above the sea, faces, friendships, long lunches, iced tea in summer, in short, all that Princeton and his happy summers had meant to him—complicated by the fact that he was now expected to do certain things (marry, begin a career, repay the world what it had given him), he met that figure whose kindness, whose beauty seemed a magic bridge between his youth and the next phase of his existence. He fell in love with Malone while the two of them left the stoop and went down the street that first afternoon to buy peaches on First Avenue; that was all it took. The sunlight glowing on the golden hair of Malone's forearm, the veins in his hand, the peach it held, the dusty trees, transfixed him. He found the city hideous, but in it was Malone. He wished to take him out of it, to stand with him some summer morning on a mountaintop at dawn and watch the fog roll back from the farms spread out below. He wanted to go with Malone to Greece. He had just begun to interpret the world in terms of love, and as is the case with converts, now nothing else mattered.