retty little product of creams and
manicure.

"She's _some_ girl," he thought. "And what a blazing wonder that she'll
look at me. Yet I can twist her round my little finger--on occasions
like to-night."

By a very humanly understandable metempsychosis she became just a little
less shining because more reachable; some of her shine transferred to
him. His conception of the whole thing was physical; hers was not
consciously physical at all. But as she lay, long after he was asleep,
watching the candles fade one by one, leaving a fainter purple in the
sky, she felt vaguely disappointed; all this business of love-making
seemed to mean so much less to Louis than it did to her; he did not take
it seriously, or rather he did not make it the high feast she found it.
He could be flippant about it. For her it broke down every barrier,
every reservation. Louis was able to come down immediately from ecstasy
to everyday things. This, she argued, meant that he had not flown so
very high after all. He was able to make a laughing, half-embarrassed
remark to the effect that he hoped no one else was on the roofs round
about. She would not have cared if everyone in Sydney was on the roofs.
For her no one existed just then but Louis. That had jarred a little.
Then there were no more cigarettes and he had, quite petulantly,
complained of the trouble of going down into the room for a new tin. She
had gone cheerfully, as she would have fetched things for her father.
She did not realize that, by waiting on his whims, she was lowering
herself in his esteem. He had taken the cigarettes without a word of
thanks. It was only when she lay awake for hours afterwards, with a
vague discomfort that was certainly not physical, that she remembered
and was amazed that he could have remembered cigarettes just then. It
did not square at all with her Lover dream. And the Southern Cross as
she lay with unblinking eyes staring into the great, still dome above
her, was disappointing. She had heard so much about it; she had thought
it would be a group of flaming suns in the night sky. And its separate
pointers were not even so big and bright as Venus. She felt, somehow,
that she had been cheated a little; and immediately told herself that it
was not so really--either she had expected too much, or else she was not
clever enough to see what was really there all the time.

She did not go to sleep all the night. It was at four o'clock that she
crept quietly from u