e the salt
keenness of the sea had pierced, and its washing edge had whispered a
soft undertone to the city sounds that rang up through the still evening
air. They had looked down and seen how the spreading city far below
bloomed like a great rose of many colours in the soft falling twilight;
how the sky and the sea were still delicately flushed with the
afterglow; how, above the flattened cone of Vesuvius, a great yellow
moon swung up into the blue still east. It had looked upon the city with
a large, mellow charity, softly touching its many colours, deepening the
steep shadows of the streets that ran through it like gorges. It had
laid a broad yellow path for itself across the blue spaces of the
evening sea, and so twilight had deepened tenderly to night.

They had all drunk to each other in red Posilipo, and wished themselves
and each other good luck, and Gina Lunelli had said, for the twentieth
time, 'You won't find any place so good to live in as Naples,' and Tommy
had said, 'You must come and stay with us some time at Santa
Caterina--all of you,' with a comprehensive sweep of his arm, generous
with the large hospitality of red Posilipo. Betty had said how Genoa,
too, was a gay place, with plenty doing, only the winds that blew down
its streets in winter were certainly evil and bitter, and one had to
wear all one's clothes at once. But Santa Caterina was different; Italy
certainly held no such other place, and they must, of course, one day
all come and see.

Thus they talked, and laughed, and sang songs, and looked away from the
city which held in its deep shadows so much of their life. It would have
been quite easy then to slip down among the shadows and the colours and
take that life again, broken as it was, in time perhaps forgetting
everything. New beginnings were so hard, the call of the old things so
insistent. The old things that they had of late so hated, as spoilers of
their lives, they knew that they would not always hate--if now they went
down into the shadowed streets and took them again, striving to forget,
in the end all but forgetting, this cleavage which so lay across life.
For all cleavages may be bridged with time.

So, sick-hearted, the Crevequers had looked at the old ways which so
clogged them, which would possibly (why not?) always clog them, clinging
heavily like mire; and at the new ways which they were seeking wearily,
with no heart, with 'too late' echoing in their souls like a knell.