fully, as one who knows he has the right to come and go, out of
that wet grey street of which she was a part, to wander as he chose in
strange continents, in exotic weathers, through time sequined with
extravagant dawns and sunsets, through space jewelled with towns running
red with blood of revolutions or multi-coloured with carnival. In every
way he was richer than she was, for he had more joy in travelling than
she would have had, since over the scenic world she saw there was cast
for him a nexus of romance which she could not have perceived.

Everywhere he would meet men whom he had captained on desperate
adventures, who over wine would point ringed fingers at mountain ranges
and whisper of forgotten mines and tempt him to adventures that would
take him away from her for ever so long. Everywhere he would meet women,
hateful feminine women of the sort who are opposed to Woman Suffrage,
who, because of some past courtesy of his, would throw him roses and try
to make him watch their dancing feet. She sobbed with rage as she
perceived how different from her the possession of this past made him.
When he reached Rio he would not stand by the quiet bay as she would
have stood, enraptured by the several noble darknesses of the sky, the
mountains, and the ship-starred sea, but would go quickly to his house
on the hill, not hurrying, but showing by a lightness in his walk, by a
furtive vivacity of his body, that he was involved in some private
system of exciting memories. He would open the wrought-iron gates with a
key which she had not known he possessed, which had lain close to him in
one of those innumerable pockets that men have in their clothes. With
perfect knowledge of the path, he would step silently through the
garden, where flowers run wild had lost their delicacy and grew as
monstrous candelabra of coarsened blooms in soil greenly feculent with
weeds; she rejoiced in its devastation. He would enter the hall and pick
his steps between the pools of wine that lay black on the marble floor;
he would tread on the rosettes of corruption that had once been garlands
of roses hung about the bronze whale's neck; he would look down on the
white limbs of the shattered Venus, and look up and listen to the
creaking flight of the birds of prey that were nesting under the broken
roof; and he would smile as if he shared a secret with the ruin and
dissipation. His smile was the sun, but in it there was always a dark
ray of secrecy. A