e the downward notes, and hang a breath too
long on the phrase-ends, as only Italians dare! And how the distilled
essence of Italy dripped out of those luscious, tender, mocking
folk-songs, till the vineyards steeped before us, and the white
city-squares baked in the noon sun, and the ardent sailor sang to his
brown girl over the quaint, bobbing, weighted nets!

The men who dug the ice-house and piled the coast wall and blasted out
trenches for draining would stop and lean on their picks, when her
resonant, golden humming, like a drowsy contralto bee, floated out
from the verandah vines to them: I have seen their faces clear and
their dull eyes focus suddenly on some distant, darling memory, while
they dropped back for a precious minute into the past that you think
is all bread and cheese and beer, because, forsooth, they never sat
beside you in white gloves when Margarita sang!

Go to--there was Spring and a girl for every man of them, once, and
both were the same as yours.

I had to go into her room at that time, to make sure that the floor
should not be unduly marred and that, according to the best of my poor
judgment (Roger should have planned it all, as a matter of fact) the
registers might be inserted in the best places; and as I moved among
the dainty luxuries that replaced the almost sordid bareness of that
room when I had first seen it, I realised, with surprise but with
clear certainty, that the change was only apparent, not deep or
inherent. They were all there, to be sure, the pretty paraphernalia
that modern woman (and ancient, too, for the matter of that!) has
found necessary to preserve and augment her mystery and charm; ivory
and silver and crystal and fluted frills and scented silk. Oh, yes,
they were all there, but there was no atmosphere of Margarita amongst
them all: she had escaped out of them and given them the slip as
effectually as in the old, bare days of the brush and comb and the
print gown on a peg in the unscented closet. She was simply not there,
that was all, and the most infatuated lover in all the Decameron would
have felt that here was not the place for self-indulgent raptures.
Margarita used her sleeping-room as a snail uses his shell or a bird
its nest: it was impersonal, deserted, out of commission, now--the
room, merely, of a beautiful woman, who might have been any woman,
with a woman's need of comfort, warmth, clear air, and cleanliness
pushed to an arrogance of physical purity