This chapter's epigraph is from a famous poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Ballad of a Young Man." In this poem, a young man asks a young woman to kiss him. When the young woman replies that she will not, the young man's heart skips a beat, and he begins to cry. The girl tells him that she is afraid that if he does not kiss her, she will swallow him up. The young man tries to comfort her, but the girl is too afraid to tell him what is happening. He tells her that