e knew.

It was a fine saying, she thought, but for the moment she was less
interested in it than in Emile's mood, his mind, when he had written
it. She realized now, on this calm of the sea, how absurd had been the
thought that a man so subtle as Emile would flagrantly reveal a passing
phase of his nature, a secret irritability, a jealousy, perhaps, or a
sudden hatred in a sentence written for any eyes that chose to see. But
he might covertly reveal himself to one who understood him well.

She sat still, trying to match her subtlety against his.

From the shore came sounds of changing music, low down or falling to
them from the illuminated heights where people were making merry in the
night. Now and then a boat passed them. In one, young men were singing,
and interrupting their song to shout with laughter. Here and there a
fisherman's torch glided like a great fire-fly above the oily darkness
of the sea. The distant trees of the gardens climbing up the hill
made an ebony blackness beneath the stars, a blackness that suggested
impenetrable beauty that lay deep down with hidden face. And the lights
dispersed among them, gaining significance by their solitude, seemed to
summon adventurous or romantic spirits to come to them by secret paths
and learn their revelation. Over the sea lay a delicate warmth, not
tropical, not enervating, but softly inspiring. And beyond the circling
lamps of Naples Vesuvius lit up the firmament with a torrent of
rose-colored fire that glowed and died, and glowed again, constantly as
beats a heart.

And to Hermione came a melancholy devoid of all violence, soft almost
as the warmth upon this sea, quite as the resignation of the fatalistic
East. She felt herself for a moment such a tiny, dark thing caught in
the meshes of the great net of the Universe, this Universe that she
could never understand. What could she do? She must just sink down upon
the breast of this mystery, let it take her, hold her, do with her what
it would.

Her subtlety against Emile's! She smiled to herself in the dark. What
a combat of midgets! She seemed to see two marionettes battling in the
desert.

And yet--and yet! She remembered a saying of Flaubert's, that man is
like a nomad journeying on a camel through the desert; and he is the
nomad, and the camel--and the desert.

How true that was, for even now, as she felt herself to be nothing, she
felt herself to be tremendous.

She heard the sound of oars from the