. A man with a girl like Lolita must expect to find other men
after her. It depends on your girl. You find that out when you go after
other men's girls. When a woman surely loves some other man she will not
look at you. And Lolita's love was a sure thing. A woman can say love
and a man will believe her--until he has experienced the genuine article
once; after that he can always tell. And to have a house, with her
inside waiting for you! Such a turn was strange luck for a man, not to
be accounted for. If anybody had said last year--why, as late as the
20th of last March--that settling down was what you were coming to--and
now--Genesmere wondered how he could ever have seen anything in riding a
horse up and down the earth and caring nothing for what next. "No longer
alone!" he said aloud, suddenly, and surprised the white horse.

The song about the hunchback and the sacristan's cat stirred its rhythm
in his mind. He was not a singer, but he could think the tune, trace it,
naked of melody, in the dry realm of the brain. And it was a diversion
to piece out the gait of the phantom notes, low after high, quick after
slow, until they went of themselves. Lolita would never kiss Luis again;
would never want to--not even as a joke. Genesmere turned his head back
to take another look at the rider, and there stood the whole mountains
like a picture, and himself far out in the flat country, and the bare
sun in the sky. He had come six miles on the road since he had last
noticed. Six miles, and the air-castle was rebuilt and perfect, with no
difference from the old one except its foundation, which was upon sand.
To see the unexpected plain around him, and the islands of blue, sharp
peaks lying in it, drove the tune from his head, and he considered the
well-known country, reflecting that man could not be meant to live here.
The small mountain-islands lay at all distances, blue in a dozen ways,
amid the dead calm of this sand archipelago. They rose singly from it,
sheer and sudden, toothed and triangled like icebergs, hot as stoves.
The channels to the north, Santa Rosa way, opened broad and yellow, and
ended without shore upon the clean horizon, and to the south narrowed
with lagoons into Sonora. Genesmere could just see one top of the Sierra
de la Quitabac jutting up from below the earth-line, splitting the main
channel, the faintest blue of all. They could be having no trouble over
their water down there, with the Laguna Esperanca and