th a deep, deep, almost unreachable bitterness.--Like a deep
burn on his deepest soul, Lottie. And like a fate which he resented, yet
which steadied him, Lilly.

He went home and lay on his bed. He had enough self-command to hear the
gong and go down to dinner. White and abstract-looking, he sat and ate
his dinner. And then, thank God, he could go to bed, alone, in his own
cold bed, alone, thank God. To be alone in the night! For this he was
unspeakably thankful.

CHAPTER XIX. CLEOPATRA, BUT NOT ANTHONY

Aaron awoke in the morning feeling better, but still only a part
himself. The night alone had restored him. And the need to be alone
still was his greatest need. He felt an intense resentment against the
Marchesa. He felt that somehow, she had given him a scorpion. And his
instinct was to hate her. And yet he avoided hating her. He remembered
Lilly--and the saying that one must possess oneself, and be alone in
possession of oneself. And somehow, under the influence of Lilly, he
refused to follow the reflex of his own passion. He refused to hate the
Marchesa. He _did_ like her. He did _esteem_ her. And after all, she too
was struggling with her fate. He had a genuine sympathy with her. Nay,
he was not going to hate her.

But he could not see her. He could not bear the thought that she might
call and see him. So he took the tram to Settignano, and walked away all
day into the country, having bread and sausage in his pocket. He sat for
long hours among the cypress trees of Tuscany. And never had any trees
seemed so like ghosts, like soft, strange, pregnant presences. He lay
and watched tall cypresses breathing and communicating, faintly moving
and as it were walking in the small wind. And his soul seemed to
leave him and to go far away, far back, perhaps, to where life was
all different and time passed otherwise than time passes now. As in
clairvoyance he perceived it: that our life is only a fragment of the
shell of life. That there has been and will be life, human life such as
we do not begin to conceive. Much that is life has passed away from men,
leaving us all mere bits. In the dark, mindful silence and inflection of
the cypress trees, lost races, lost language, lost human ways of feeling
and of knowing. Men have known as we can no more know, have felt as we
can no more feel. Great life-realities gone into the darkness. But the
cypresses commemorate. In the afternoon, Aaron felt the cypresses rising
dark a