irectly he had said the words he
knew that his voice had become frigid.

"What a stupid ass I am!" was his comment on himself. But how to be
different?

Mrs. Shiffney was looking very grave. Her drawn-down brows, her powerful
lips suggested to him at this moment suffering. In London he had thought
of her as a typical pleasure-seeking woman, greedy of sensation,
reckless in the chase after it. And he had disliked, almost feared her,
despite her careless charm. Now he felt differently about her. He had
come to that point in a man's acquaintance with a woman when he says to
himself, "I never understood her properly." He seemed to himself a
brute. Yet what had he done?

She did not speak for several minutes. He wanted to speak, to break a
silence which, to him, was painful; but he could think of nothing to
say. He felt oddly moved, yet he could not have said why, perhaps even
to himself. Keeping his hands clasped round his knees, he looked out
beyond the gorge over the open country. Far down, at the foot of the
cascades, he saw in a hollow, the clustering trees about the baths of
Sidi Imcin. Along the reddish bareness of the hill showed the white
blossoms of some fruit-trees, almost like a white dust flung up against
the tawny breast of the earth. The water made a hoarse noise in the
hidden depths of the gorge, lifted its voice into a roar as it leaped
down into the valley, murmured like the voice of a happy dreamer where
it slipped by among the trees. And Claude, as he sat in silence,
believed that he heard clearly the threefold utterance, subtly combined,
and, like some strange trinity, striving to tell him truths of life.

His eyes travelled beyond the gorge, the precipices, the tree-tops,
beyond the hard white track far down beneath his feet, to the open
country, bare, splendid, almost incredibly spacious, fiercely blooming
in the strong colors--reds, yellows, golds--with long rolling slopes,
dimpling shallow depressions, snakelike roads, visible surely for
hundreds of kilometers, far-off ranges of solemn mountains whose crests
seemed to hint at divinity. And as he looked he felt that he wanted, or
perhaps needed, something that he had certainly never had, that must
exist, that must have been, be, known to some few men and women; only
that something experienced made life truly life.

For a moment, in some mysterious process of the mind, Claude mingled his
companion with the dream and the longing, transfigured, stan