sky was turning green, having
performed their ceremonial ablutions, they prayed.

"For what?"

"Behind the formal words? Who knows? For whatever they desired most.
Probably for something that nobody would suspect."

"And the women?" she ventured, looking at him sidewise.

In those remote walled towns they still remained invisible. Their
minds, restricted to puerilities, had never grown up. Their bodies
were so lax that their short weekly promenade to the cemetery exhausted
them. Seated on cushions, they spent their time listening to cuckoo
clocks and music boxes, smelling perfumes, putting their jewelry away
in caskets, then bedizening themselves all over again. Their servants,
who had known in childhood the hurly burly of caravanserais and slave
markets, told them of a world where everybody was possessed by a
thousand devils of ingenuity and wit. And those scented ladies with
feeble flesh, hollow eyes, and the brains of parrots, after listening
for a while in vague regret, all at once became bored. Whereupon they
fell to playing parchesi and eating sweetmeats.

In such sheltered and languid lives Lilla seemed to perceive a
similarity to her own life. Or, at least, she felt that her life, if
he knew it in detail, would seem to him almost as trivial.

"Poor souls," she said. "But one surely finds others out there," she
persisted, unfurling her large fan of yellow plumes, and looking at it
intently. "White women, for example, the women of the empire builders?
At such meetings, in those far-off places, romance must be almost
inevitable. Each finds in the other an overwhelming congeniality? The
loneliness round about exerts a tremendous persuasion?"

"Oh, yes," he assented, with a smile. "Especially if the lady smokes a
pipe."

He told her of an Englishwoman whom he had met in the Masai veldt,
hunting for maneless lions--an amazon in breeches and boots, at the
head of her own safari. Week after week she had led her dark-skinned
retainers through the wilds, cheerily doctoring them in their
sicknesses, herself never ailing or weary. At the charge of a lion she
had withheld her fire till the last possible moment. By night, the
safari encamped, she had sat before her tent in a folding chair, one
knee cocked over the other, a pipe between her teeth, listening to the
gossip of ragged wanderers who had been attracted by the firelight and
the smell of burning fat.

"I find such women incomprehensible," L