Chapter X

The lazy enchantment of their exile lasted through the summer. In September, Lilah complained to Flagg that all of New York seemed to have moved to Florence. Whenever she went to town she met some one she had known during her brief appearance as Mrs. Robert Peabody. She encountered curiosity but, from the younger generation, at least, no hostility; she was not certain whether this was an indication of social emancipation or due, rather, to her own remoteness from the lives, the activities of these people--she was, perhaps, not worth snubbing! The older generation was unaware of her; their standards resisted, obdurately, the pressure of modern opinion. Lilah could dismiss them because they were “old-fashioned.” But she resented the casual indifference of her contemporaries; it was selfish, even vulgar; she had, it seemed, nothing material to offer them! She was bitterly aware that most of them could have been hooked had she baited her line with millions. Money, enough of it, meant pleasure, diversion, a sop for the martyrdom of satiety. She could have lured the fashionable world to one of the veritable _ville_ in the hills near Florence--jazz on a Medicean terrace, swimming parties in a marble basin by Mino da Fiesole, a liberal supply of sporting Italians of the upper class.... Her scandal would be an asset under such glamorous circumstances. The “Villino Sans-Souci” was another story.

McNair came again, bringing a young Englishman, a pianist, a pupil of Busoni, who played on the poet’s upright. He soothed Lilah because, without hesitation, he fell in love with her; she called him “silly boy,” but he was, if anything, older than Lilah; he “adored” women, professed to have been badly treated by them, to have thrown himself away, whereas he was quite unscrupulous, lazy and irresponsible. He played with facility and refused to practice because he seemed to have been born with a technique. Tall, heavy, he had the typical thespian’s skull, the profile of a Shakesperian actor.

He made love to Lilah whenever Flagg’s back was turned. He played “for” her, he said. Lilah began to believe that she was responsible for the seductive music he somehow got from that long-toothed piano; she saw herself in the waltzes of Kreisler, the moon-smitten nuances of Ravel, the songs of Rachmaninoff. And she was filled with a vague melancholy, almost a pity for herself, inexplicable, delicious, like the forebodings of adolescence. She would sit on the terrace with Flagg, her hand in his, and seeing the “silly boy’s” ardent profile swaying against the glow of the piano-lamp, she would think tenderly of Robert, of Junius, and of herself.... She could only relent, apparently, when she had had her own way.... She squeezed Flagg’s hand.

Lilah began to know the sort of people she would, in New York, have ignored. A thin, hawk-nosed, Pittsburgh-born American _contessa_ who lived nearby called repeatedly, bringing with her a shifting retinue of cavalry officers; the _contessa_ conducted a sort of matrimonial agency; she had, she boasted, introduced many “dear, sweet, rich American girls” to young Italians of title. Lilah suspected that she lived upon the precarious fruits of gratitude.

Flagg’s reputation attracted scientists from France, from Germany, from Rome--he was at the mercy of men who coveted his knowledge. He was always generous, but Lilah saw him in moods of savage contempt and rebellion. “You waste yourself on these people,” she said.

“I know! I wish they’d leave me alone!” But he never seemed to be able to resist them; she would rescue him from arguments carried on in half a dozen languages, lead him indoors and make him lie down. He would look up at her, his face pinched, his lips pale, and with a gesture of hopelessness, say: “I’ll have to go back, some day, and work! I don’t know a damn thing!” And once he added, with a querulous bitterness: “There’s so little time.”

“But you’re going to get well.”

“Yes,” he said. “Perhaps. It’s a new idea.... If I do, it will be because of you.” He smiled. “I’m not used to you, Lilah! I find myself looking at you, wondering who you are and how you came to be here.... You’re not sorry, are you?”

“Not if you aren’t.”

So they reassured each other.

* * * * *

Flagg was not a man who enjoyed idleness. McNair left for Edinburgh. Save only Don Orlando, a priest who came down from Siena occasionally to spend an hour in the arbor, and an eccentric Florentine, a sort of inventor-alchemist, there was no one he enjoyed. He took to wandering away into the country, on foot. Lilah was left to her own devices. She tried to convince herself that she was happy. This was what she had made for herself; she could not question his love; her own was deeper than she had thought possible--her feeling consumed her. But her character was unchanged. She resisted, despised discipline; denial made her intractable. She wanted pleasure, excitement, admiration. There was danger in the heartless and unstable passion of such men as the English pianist. She hated herself because this was so. But she told herself that had Flagg been different, she would have been contented to sit in the arbor at the Ponte a Mensola, secure in the possession of love.

Something instinctive in Flagg, out of reach, resisted accepted social standards. He stood aloof from close personal bonds, even, fundamentally, from Lilah. He was solitary, but not morose. She never really knew his failings or his ambitions; his confidences were always touched with self-scorn, yet he refused sympathy--it was as if he preferred to find his own way. His feeling for her was identical; he realized, perhaps, that sex would entangle him, hold him back from that mysterious pursuit of his. He was not easily stirred by her mere physical presence; she never felt that he had gone into the adventure through a desire for gratification. And she was flattered by his most casual caress because she realized that he was not demonstrative; his emotions were deep, strong and, when aroused, ruthless.

But there were moments when Lilah was baffled by his reserve; she felt inadequate. Her own human, reprehensible sufferings, longings and jealousies fell back before his impartiality. He had believed in their right to live together. The fact that she did not love her husband, Flagg insisted, absolved her. But he had not stopped to consider what the affair might mean to Lilah; it was demoralizing, she decided, to ignore the world’s opinion. If Flagg should die, she would have no resistance.

Thoughts like these threaded her consciousness; for the most part, she was lulled by the fact of his presence. Whenever he touched her, she sensed the immortality of happiness.

* * * * *

Coming out of Doney’s confectionery shop one afternoon, with a box of French pastry, she met Mrs. Sinclair, a willowy figure in gray crêpe, with enveloping veils, descending from an open touring-car painted royal blue.

“My precious darling.”

She enfolded Lilah briefly.

“I heard that you’d run off with Putnam Flagg. The Wagners crossed with you. That witty Wagner girl was too absurd--she said you’d been flagged. Was that vulgar? How are you?”

“Awfully well,” Lilah answered. She was sorry that she had worn her most unbecoming hat and a dress that was much too short for the mode.

“Of course you came to Florence. Extraordinary, how they all do--people who break away--irresponsible, brave people! Sinclair and I are so desperately conventional. We’ve been married fifteen years and neither of us has ever cast the eye--well, not seriously! Sinclair’s in the car. Don’t speak to him, Lilah darling--he’d be shocked. Flagg hasn’t a cent, has he? I don’t see, frankly, why you did it, or what you gained. You had everything on earth you could ask for, and New York at your feet. Sympathy is with Robert, of course. He’s enormously popular, and any number of women are applying.... You aren’t divorced?”

“No.”

Mrs. Sinclair turned with a swirl, positively oriental, of draperies.

“Are the chocolates good here? We’re on our way to Bologna--then on up, to Paris. They say Doucet’s clothes are inimitable, and I’m in rags.”

She went into the shop and Lilah, lifting her head, crossed the sidewalk to the royal blue car. Behind a pair of smoked goggles she found Sinclair’s eyes staring at her with a sort of panic. “How do you do?” He gasped, leaned forward, offered a limp hand. “How do you do? Beastly weather, isn’t it? Where are you stopping?”

“At the Ponte a Mensola,” Lilah said sweetly.

“Well, I must say, you’re looking fit.”

“I am.”

“What’s May doing? Tell her to hurry!”

Lilah turned away. The encounter had left her trembling. She crossed the Tornabuoni, signaled a cab and drove all the way back to the Ponte a Mensola. Somehow this extravagance comforted her.

The ride was long and dusty. A stream of cars and trucks, carts and trolleys, blocked the narrow road between endless villa walls. The cabman, a disreputable Tuscan in a frock coat and a patent-leather hat, gurgled and hiccoughed at the horse. She could imagine the progress of the Sinclair’s motor, climbing the tortuous streets of sun-smitten hilltowns, rushing across the Lombardian plain, climbing Alpine passes, on again through France to Paris--in its wake a servile host with well-silvered palms bent in an attitude of obeisance to American millions. Lilah knew how Mrs. Sinclair would spend her time in Paris--a round of the _couturières_, perhaps in the company of a Frenchman, a rarefied sycophant, dancer, flatterer and debased wit who would criticize _mannequins_ and gowns, choose May Sinclair’s wardrobe and profit by her vanity to the extent of a cruise in the Sinclair yacht or a trip to the South of France in the Sinclair’s private car.

Lilah’s imagination, like a shutter, opened and closed upon visions of fashionable America, the people she had known and might eventually have dominated, moving from Paris to London, from Biarritz to San Moritz, from New York to Palm Beach. Their houses, jewels, clothes, pleasures, were rare and exclusive enough to permit them any latitude of behavior; now that she was not a part of their life, Lilah could be contemptuous. Except for chance, she would in all probability have been in Paris, buying the best of Doucet’s collection ... or ... no; at the Point, waiting for her child to be born....

She put her hands up to her face.

Women like May Sinclair had escaped. Lilah suffered because she had not been content to use the material at hand--the fabric for the fashioning of her dreams had always been just beyond reach.

She decided to say nothing to Flagg of her encounter. She went up the steep path from the gate to the house. Flagg was leaning on the terrace wall. The late sun gilded him, so that he was like a figure in bronze. Lilah called: “You old pagan! I want ten _lire_. I’ve been extravagant.”

“Ten _lire_?”

“To pay the cabman.”

“Lilah,” Flagg said seriously, “you haven’t changed.”

“But I have!”

She paid the cabman and ran back to Flagg. “But I _have_ changed! I needed gloves and bought pastry instead for your tea--black, sticky cakes with cherries on top. Look!”

Flagg looked. “Lilah, do you know, I think that cat’s going to have kittens!”

They went to the arbor. Lilah admitted that Flagg’s suspicions were justified; the little black cat _was_ going to have kittens. And Flagg said: “Damn! I hate having dumb things suffer. We’ll have to make a bed for her.”

He went into the house and came back with a clothesbasket and a blanket. “But she’s not going to have them to-day!” Lilah cried. Flagg answered seriously that it was just as well to be prepared. These things upset him; birth was terrifying. “I hope you’ll never have a child. I’d probably die. Go mad. Knock my brains out.”

Lilah stroked the cat. Her heart tightened. After a moment she said: “I won’t have a child.”

“What do you mean?”

“That time when I was thrown--”

Their eyes met. Something flashed across Flagg’s eyes, a fugitive anger. “Oh. That was it. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I couldn’t.”

“You can tell me anything.”

After a pause, he added: “You weren’t quite honest, Lilah. I wouldn’t have gone to Maine if I had known what you’ve just told me. Your husband has every reason to believe that I’m a cad.”

“Must we talk about these things? Can’t we forget them?”

He stooped again over the basket. His expression was not guarded and Lilah cried: “If you think I wanted to be hurt--if you think I tried deliberately--”

Flagg turned away. “We can’t forget these things. But you’re right; we needn’t talk about them.”

When he had gone, Lilah wept a little. The warm, sinewy body of the stray cat comforted her; she held it close, as she would never have held one of Robert’s spaniels, letting her tears fall on the glossy fur like drops of quicksilver. If she sat there long enough, she knew, Flagg would come back, repentant. And presently he came, drawn by her silence. “I’m sorry, Lilah.”

She burst out: “You’re thinking of yourself when you ask me not to divorce Robert! I could, easily, in Paris.” The accusation was turned adroitly against Flagg. “Am I selfish? Isn’t it, rather, a question of honesty? Must we go over that again?” Lilah turned her head away. “I’m unhappy.” Flagg gazed at her with a curious detachment, as if he were seeing her for the first time. Presently he said deliberately: “If divorce will make you happy, by all means go to Paris. I don’t know what the process is, how long you’d have to live there or whether, in the end, we could afford the necessary expense. But you must, at all costs, be happy.”

Later in the day, still smarting under the memory of Sinclair’s dismissal, she wrote to Junius: “I am going to divorce Robert. Will you find out from him, for my sake, whether he would be willing to come to Paris and make the necessary arrangements?” She added, with a flourish of defiance: “I am gloriously happy.”

With the letter safely in the post, Lilah felt a return of security. It was only a matter of time before she could demand recognition. She dreamed of subjugating Florence; there was opportunity for a clever, pretty and accomplished woman to have a distinguished “drawing-room.” She hadn’t money, but she had everything else.

With this possibility in mind she looked with new eyes at the “Villino Sans-Souci.” The poet had furnished it with lavish bad taste. He had had a morbid turn of mind, and perhaps to stimulate his imagination or in the interests of publicity had slept in a bed built like a gondola, black, funereal, uncomfortable, and had placed a wooden statue of Aphrodite in a niche, a sort of shrine before which he had burned tapers “to love and sorrow.” His drawing-room was a museum of amorous mementoes, signed photographs of pretty actresses--_Á mon cher! Tua, Maria. Sempre, Nina_--abominable porcelains, first editions, cushions and ecclesiastical velvets. His desk, where he had probably written “_Belle Mani_,” was the largest piece of furniture Lilah had ever seen, an affair of ebony inlaid with mother-of-pearl, “a battleground for literature,” Flagg said. “The whole place is like an embalmed scandal.”

The house itself was old; it had been a _podesta’s_ and bore the patina of several centuries. “I believe we could buy it for a song,” Lilah said. She kissed the tips of her fingers. “And I could make it into one of the loveliest houses in Florence.”

Her desire for beauty had never got her anywhere. Now she was restless and dissatisfied because there were too many footstools and majolica vases in the “Villino Sans-Souci.” A few thousand dollars--only a few--would transform this wilderness into a setting worthy of her ambition. She began to haunt the shops along the Borgognissanti, where, for ridiculous prices, she was offered the treasures of palaces; Sixteenth Century tables, dim Venetian mirrors, flamboyant chairs, chests, silver, brocades stiff with tarnished gold threads, faded, “like sunlight through claret.” Her desire for possession--she was a victim of her love of these things--was a sort of drunkenness; she made promises, broke them, had furniture sent to the “Villino Sans-Souci” on approval and sent back again; she was at once the despair and the victim of the antiquaries.

Flagg had no idea that she had in her possession the pearls Robert had given her. They were hidden away in a hat-box together with the emerald crown and bracelet.

One day she took them to a dealer whose shop was on the Ponte Vecchio, an unpretentious, shadowy room ten feet square. Across a modern counter upholstered in black velvet, Lilah faced a man who was positively medieval, lean, dark and clever; he had the delicate hands of an expert, flexible wrists and pointed, sensitive, critical fingers. The pearls, a long string, lay coiled on a small cushion, an opalescent serpent. Lilah had no idea how much they were worth. “I want to sell them,” she explained. The dealer considered, his hands clasped under his chin. His offer, in lire, astonished her, but she covered her surprise with an emphatic shake of her head.

“Too little?” The dealer’s face became enigmatic. “I recognize these pearls, Madame. They belong to the Peabody collection. I sold them--this clasp--to Mr. Junius Peabody, thirty years ago. I never forget a really important purchase; sooner or later, the most valuable pearls in the world pass through my hands. I have, besides, a record.”

Suppressing a feeling of guilt, Lilah said: “The pearls are mine. I am Mrs. Robert Peabody.”

“I see. Exactly.... I can sell the string, immediately, to an American lady who is now in Rome. My offer stands.”

Realizing that this man was superior to the sort of bargaining usual on the Rialto, Lilah accepted the offer. The pearls were whisked away by a clerk. The dealer remarked upon the weather. And the clerk, returning, paid into Lilah’s hands the sum of seventy-five thousand lire. She signed her name--once, twice--the dealer bowed without a trace of animation, and she went out again into the street, a street, a world transformed, no longer inimical, but hers. A duck of a world!

* * * * *

A duck of a world!

With seventy-five thousand lire hidden away beneath the tissue paper in an “Annette” hat-box, happiness flowed back over Lilah’s spirit. Her worldly surface, that inimitable appearance of security, reappeared. Her manner became decisive, her bearing assured. She found it possible to smoke a cigarette with her old manner of casual indifference. She could be Russian without an inward shiver of self-ridicule and distrust.

She postponed buying what she coveted because, in possession of seventy-five thousand lire, she could afford to be particular. The “Villino Sans-Souci” was inadequate. She must have one of the smaller Medicean houses--she could imagine Mrs. Sinclair saying: “Lilah, darling! What a delicious garden!”

With the _contessa_, in a hired carriage driven by a respectable coachman in livery, Lilah inspected the available houses. Flagg knew nothing of these excursions. The gates of imposing, crumbling _ville_ were thrown open and Lilah glimpsed some of the most coveted interiors in Italy. The demoralizing simplicity and perfection of these rooms--spacious, exquisite in proportion, frescoed--went to her head. She found herself living in imagination in a setting contrived by the most cunning artists of Lorenzo’s day for a corrupt and fastidious court. Terraces of stone worn smooth, grass-grown, crumbling; basins reflecting the complicated foliage of live oaks; cypress alleys and balustrades, the warm, ochre walls of Tuscan palaces, unbroken, without ornamentation, sharp against the dazzling purple of the sky....

The _contessa_ was garrulous; her enthusiasm, her bad and fluent Italian embarrassed Lilah. She was greedy, over-inquisitive. And with a sort of officious generosity she wanted to establish Lilah at once in a _villa_ at Montughi. “But, _cara mia_, it’s perfect! I don’t see what you expect. You’d better snap it up at once or some American vulgarian will lease it.”

It was easy to imagine herself established, with Flagg, in that ingenuous, expensive little palace. The seventy-five thousand _lire_, her treasure horde, were an open sesame to the most extravagant dreams.

But she did not dare to confide in Flagg; something warned her that he would not approve, understand, forgive.

The December rains drenched Florence. Valambrosa was powdered with snow. The Arno, amber, swollen, poured through the city, covered the mud flats, became all at once a veritable river.

Flagg was driven indoors. He began, tentatively, to write. The effort exhausted him. He would wrestle with his enemy, breathless, contemptuous, until he collapsed.

And suddenly, for no reason, out of her security, the idea came and persisted that her happiness was threatened.

Flagg was ill again.

Lilah never knew the precise moment when she was first aware that he might not be going to live. His eyes were frightened most of the time, although he kept on smiling at her. Noises irritated him. He wanted silence. He would sit at his desk, writing, into the night, obstinate. And when she spoke to him, he would shake his head and ask her to go away. There was something he wanted to do, to finish, before he called quits. It was absurd to say that he couldn’t work. He could.

On fine days he sat in the arbor, holding the cat and smiling a queer, fixed smile that terrified Lilah. When it rained, he moved indoors and sat, bent, in an attitude which was belligerent and pathetic, at his desk--that “battle-ground of literature” inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

At night he would come into her room and lie with his face pressed against her shoulder, like a child that is afraid of what he might see in the dark.

When she questioned him, he was perfectly still.

And now, she knew, she loved him more than anything in the world.

* * * * *

Love, complete love, came because she knew she could not have it. Flagg was going to die. She had let herself off from feeling, because there was always time to give way to an emotion that would be so great that something of herself would have to perish. Now, because there was so little time, she surrendered to it. She could not dodge facts any more; she must face them and make of her life what she could with what she had. Her nature was terrible to her because she was in the grip of a genuine passion; she wanted to make herself over in time to conquer Flagg’s reticence, to have him for herself. She had been selfish. She had taken whatever she wanted, without caring. But she had cared.... It hadn’t been easy to give up everything and come to Flagg. She wasn’t superior, as Flagg was superior, to humiliation.

But now she saw what she had come for.

She saw herself, little, defeated, having to start all over again. She was humble, frightened. She saw that she could have nothing without earning it. And this revelation was like an unendurable light beating against her consciousness. There was no escape. Because the future held no happiness, the present was terrible, since it contained the essence of the thing she would go on wanting all the rest of her life. It was so precious, so elusive, so beautiful, and so inevitable.

She could not bear to watch Flagg’s suffering. She sent for a physician who came out from Florence and was alone with Flagg for two hours. Lilah waited, her heart fluttering as if she, not Flagg, were going to die.

When the two men finally opened the door and came out, Flagg was still smiling, but it was not that fixed, self-conscious smile Lilah had come to fear. He seemed relieved. The physician nodded casually to Lilah and drove away again, in a rickety cab, toward the city. Lilah thought: “He can’t be a great specialist and come in a _carozza_. I won’t believe anything....”

Flagg said: “It’s all right, Lilah. I’m sorry you worried. I’ve got a chance. Only I’ll have to stop writing.”

Lilah thought: “He’s not telling me the truth. He’s going to die and he’s glad of it.”

After that she felt that everything was against her, even Flagg’s will to die. If he had really loved her, he would have wanted to live.

She heard from Junius Peabody toward the end of December. The familiar, heavily embossed stationery post-marked Peabody’s Point bore her name and the frivolous address: “Villino Sans-Souci” in Junius’ spidery hand. Lilah tore the envelope open with a feeling of impending crisis.

She read:

“DEAR LILAH:

“Your letter, the first from you in over six months, contained no
news of yourself. I wanted to know whether or not you had made a
success of your experiment. Society has never been charitable to
women who take happiness they are not entitled to. A few celebrated
women of genius have escaped criticism because their contribution was
superior to their ‘transgression.’ I am not preaching to you. In this
day and generation there are no fixed standards of behavior. I am
only complaining because there is something shoddy, to me, offensive,
in a woman of your quality ‘taking’ life in a rented villa--one of
that pathetic band of outlaws who play at respectability in the
smaller cities of Europe. I admit my part in the affair. But I
somehow had faith that you would send that fellow packing when you
were well enough to recognize his peculiar selfishness. I cannot
resist begging you to consider seriously returning with Robert. He
will, as you request, meet you in Paris on the first day of January.
I am enclosing the name and address of his lawyer there. I will see
that your position, in America, is secured.”

He signed himself, characteristically: “Junius.”

Lilah thought angrily: “Hypocrite! He wants me there, because I amuse him.”

His own indiscretions had been made palatable, sugar-coated with secrecy. She was happier than he had ever been in his selfish enjoyment of women who had had to leave him because he was respectable. He had spared Minnie’s Victorian sensibilities by carrying on an elaborate, an “artistic” deception....

“I despise men,” Lilah said aloud.

Flagg glanced up. “Why?”

“Read this!”

She tossed Junius’ letter across the breakfast table.

Flagg’s expression was both contemptuous and embarrassed. When he spoke, his voice was unsteady. “It seems that your husband is, after all, going to let himself be divorced.”

The question of money came up immediately. Lilah couldn’t go to Paris because there wasn’t enough money. They had spent their month’s allowance already and the January draft, which wouldn’t come until the tenth of the month, would have to be used to settle the December bills. “I could wire for a few hundred. I’ve never told you. This money is mine during my life-time. It comes from an estate held in trust for my younger brother who’s out in India. When I die, it goes to him. I could borrow on the future, but I don’t want to. I never have.”

“But I’ve got to go. Think, darling, what it means! Surely, you aren’t jealous of Robert--now.”

“No.”

“I’ll have to see him. But it will be formal, embarrassing. The lawyer will explain things. And before you know it, I’ll be free.”

Flagg turned to Junius’ letter. “I’m not sure. I hardly think it will be as simple as that. They’ll urge you to go back. They’ll put up all sorts of arguments. They’ll make it hard for you. I’d prefer that you didn’t go.... Later, will be time enough.”

He got up and came around the table, touching her hair, a caress that always stirred her to the heart, it was so unconsidered and gentle, the caress of a friend; it made her precious to herself. But now, in her eagerness, she drew away.

“I must go! I want to marry you! Then, you can return to America, to the work you like. Or we can live here--properly. Be the sort of people you despise, upright, tipping-over-backward people! But we can always laugh at ourselves. We needn’t lose our sense of humor simply because we happen to be respectable....”

She paused, scared by his look, aware of her failure, but sustained by a conviction that she was misunderstood.

Flagg reminded her again that there was no money. “Only a few _lire_, unless I cable for more.”

Lilah cried: “But I have some money! Lots of it. I meant to tell you. I sold my pearls.” She laughed: “Like the lady in the melodrama....”

“I didn’t know you had any pearls.”

“They weren’t becoming,” she said carelessly. “I prefer jade, or ivory--”

“Were they valuable?”

“I got seventy-five thousand _lire_.”

“Good God.”

Flagg turned abruptly and went to the window. He stood there looking out into a downpour of rain, at Florence, sodden and drenched.

“The pearls were mine,” Lilah remarked. She felt herself growing angry. She felt that she would lose her temper if he pressed her; say things she would regret. The old self wasn’t conquered. She despised criticism. She wanted to be thought right.

Flagg turned. His face was dark again, but his feeling had driven the look of fear out of his eyes. He had forgotten himself. “You left the Peabody’s under circumstances that required the most absolute honesty. You should have come to me with the clothes you stood in. I forgave you the eight trunks full of finery--after all, your husband had no use for it, and you, apparently, did. It doesn’t matter, to you, who pays for the things you want, or whether you are giving value received. To me, it does matter.... What we did might have been splendid. It isn’t! I’m as ashamed as you are. Because of these damned, petty things--this letter, for instance! And what you’ve just told me. The stinking ugliness of desire and compromise....”

He got control of himself with a wrenching effort. “You’d better go to Paris. I’d rather compromise than be ashamed.”

* * * * *

Flagg went out and did not come back. She watched him hurry down the path to the gate, bending his head against a downpour of rain. She said bitterly: “You shouldn’t have spoken to me like that.” But he couldn’t hear, of course--the window was closed, and the rain beat against the ground with a harsh, rhythmic clatter, the noisy rain of southern countries.

Flagg disappeared up the road to Vincigliata, into the forest of young cypress trees.

Lilah thought: “I ought to feel more than I do.”

What had happened was too important for concrete, recognizable feelings. She couldn’t grasp it all at once. She was numb with misery. She went about the house doing unimportant things with great seriousness, an exaggerated attention. She put a book-shelf in order and cleaned Flagg’s study. The dust flew out of the window as she would have liked to shake out her thoughts, scatter them, get rid of them.

At ten o’clock the casual servant who came in from a near-by farm appeared under a _contadino’s_ green umbrella, like a big, wet lettuce-leaf on legs.... Lilah was explicit, much more so than usual. She set the table herself, humming, “as if nothing had happened,” she reminded herself. She had the feeling that if she ignored what had happened it couldn’t be serious. But everything she touched seemed to be impermanent; knives and forks and plates had a sort of unreality.

She went upstairs, frightened by the dread that clutched at her throat. But she must put off remembering. She would count the money--try to understand what Flagg had meant about her selling the pearls.

She counted the bills, laid them in little piles, was relieved by their ordinary appearance. Surely Flagg hadn’t stopped loving her because of these little green notes.... She put them away, confident that she could make him understand as soon as he came in.... It was absurd for a man and woman in love with each other to quarrel over something petty....

But she mustn’t think of that.

Flagg did not come in for lunch. The sky was leaden, yellow, and the rain came down in solid sheets. She couldn’t bear to be alone in the house. That wet lettuce leaf stumbled down the hill. There was no one but Aphrodite in her niche, a painted goddess with gilded ringlets and heavy lids, the smile of a courtesan, the little hands of a child.... No wonder the poet had turned to warfare for sensation. Things. Things. Things. And nothing got you anywhere. First, you thought it was this and then that. And nothing satisfied the you that was personal and aching. Not even love. For then things like this happened....

She thought: “I’ll go out. I’ll feel better if I go out.”

She splashed down the road and stood, holding her umbrella against the rain, waiting for a tram.

Twenty-five centesimi. Cheaper than a cab.... She sat with the dripping umbrella pressed against her knees and stared at the people. An old man. His trousers were baggy at the knee and the skin of his hands was like brown corduroy. A young girl with bold, unwavering eyes stared back at Lilah; there was an imitation diamond ring on the first finger of one plump, red hand.

The city closed around the street; great, drenched walls thrust up, cornices leaned over; people surged along the narrow sidewalks under a tossing and writhing of umbrellas; priests, fascisti with curled forelocks like young game-cocks, like frizzed savages ... girls....

Here and there a shop-window was lighted.

Lilah walked through the square and across to the Tornabuoni.

She went into a hairdresser’s establishment. A warm, sickish odor, perfumed, assailed her. She explained to a pale woman in pearl earrings and clinging black satin that she wanted a “wave.” Madame could be accommodated because, on a rainy day, there were many cancelations. Right here.... In this booth. _Subito!_

A small, blackish man removed Lilah’s hat. Her hair fell down on her shoulders and she thought with a stab of pain, acute, physical, of Flagg’s fingers, caressing, caressing....

The marcel irons twirled. Did Madame want pompadour or straight back? It was becoming fashionable to clip the hair at the nape of the neck, close, like a boy’s.... It would be very becoming to Madame.

Did this man love? Every one did, sooner or later. Why was it that the world wasn’t smitten with madness; would she ever be sane again.... She fingered the bottles on the dressing-table. Brilliantine. Rouge. Skin tonic. Pomade. _Mettre cette poudre avec la houppe, s’essuyer avec un linge...._

Sooner or later, she would have to question not only her reflection, that face, unchanged by dread and bewilderment, but Lilah, the woman. It wasn’t possible longer to avoid that encounter. She, herself, had failed.... _Not yet!_

“Madame has pretty hair. In French, we say _cendrè_--the colour of ashes.”

* * * * *

She found the English pianist in the drawing-room when she got back to the “Villino Sans-Souci.”

“Hallo! I thought you’d give me tea. Beastly day. Where’s Flagg?”

“He’s not here,” she said coldly. Suddenly she wanted to hurt Flagg. “I don’t know where he is.”

The Englishman’s eyes grew round. He made a sound like a whistle. “I _see_! You’ve quarreled.”

“Yes.”

Let him know it. It didn’t matter. Flagg was trying to frighten her.... She took off her hat and sank down on the divan. “I don’t want to talk. I want you to play for me. Something strange, ugly. I see now why modern art is out of balance and discordant and crooked--the world is sick at its soul. When you’re sick at your soul you don’t want beauty. You want something clever and horrible, like the evil in yourself.”

The Englishman’s eyes, always flickering, as if there were little flames in them, blazed up. His lips parted. He was like a smooth, too fat faun smoking a cigarette. His eyes appraised her. And, for a terrible reason, Lilah was glad that she was beautiful. She tipped her head back so that he could see her throat.

This man understood women; he pitied them and desired them; but they never loved him unless they had lost love; he had never known, never would know, the best of love, because he expected the worst of it.

Suddenly he jumped up and went to the piano. “I’ll play you the Saint-Sebastien; I know your real mood is religious, not evil at all! A woman of your experience buries each amour with a _Te Deum_.”

Lilah wanted to tell him that she had had no experience, but she knew that he wouldn’t believe her. Her life with Robert, with Flagg, had never really changed her; she hadn’t loved Robert, and Flagg hadn’t loved her; when people spoke of experience she supposed they meant that dedication of self which is spontaneous, mutual, irrevocable....

“Stop! I can’t bear that sort of music.”

He spun around, seized another cigarette. “Then we’ll talk. I’ll cheer you up. Poor, lonely, adorable Lilah.” He sat, too close, on the divan. “What on earth possessed you to fall in love with a man whose mind is fixed on the primeval atom?”

Lilah shrugged her shoulders. It was easy to say: “I don’t know! Why do we?”

“You ran off, didn’t you? Cut loose? I’ve heard rumors--I beg your pardon, but things get about a small place like this. Infernal curious, most people. They like to eat a pretty woman up; crunch her bones. Now, if you were ugly as mud and fat and forty, they’d call you ‘emancipated.’ Waving the banner of personal freedom and all that sort of thing.... They’d make you out a martyr to unholy matrimony, meaning matrimony which is no go. But since you’re young and lovely--very lovely--they’re tearing you to bits down there.”

“Are they?”

“I’m no end sorry for you. Really.” His eyes said more. “Doing all this for a man who doesn’t appreciate--well, you--” his eyes said. But he was too clever, too wary, to put the thought into words.

A bitterness surged up in Lilah’s heart. Six o’clock. And Flagg hadn’t come in. He might have taken a train to Rome. She saw him in Rome walking up a street in the rain, wearing that fixed smile, alone. Or Milan. Another picture. Only this time, she saw him sitting in a hotel bed-room in his shirt-sleeves.... He might have died, up there in the cypress grove. He might, even now, be lying on the soaked ground, his face pressed into the sodden leaves.

She got up. “I think you’d better go,” she said. “I want to be alone. If you don’t mind.”

The Englishman rose. She was too miserable to sense the danger. He stayed, looking down at her. And then he caught her shoulders, pressed her against him and kissed her. She could feel the softness of his body. She shivered, gasped and pushed him away. She hated him.

“Abominable!” she said.

“Oh, very well.”

With a gesture of contempt, as if it really mattered very little, he got his hat and went out, slamming the door.

* * * * *

She went upstairs, followed by the black cat and the only one of the kittens they had saved. It, too, was black, with eyes like jewels and an incredibly thin, flexible tail. The cats did not seem to know or to care whether Lilah suffered, and she wanted them to know; she said: “You little brutes! Don’t frisk! I can’t bear it!” But they frisked on the gondola-bed, over it and under it, scratching and leaping, as if nothing had happened.

Lilah undressed. Then, in a warm negligée, banded with fur, her hair under a sort of gypsy cap made of purple chiffon, she went into Flagg’s room and peered at his things, his brushes, his coats, on hangers, his handkerchiefs, in neat piles. She touched everything, sensing his dear person.... She would wait until eight o’clock, and then, if he hadn’t returned, she would go out, alone, and look for him in those dark woods.

Eight o’clock came, but she didn’t dare to go out. She got into bed, instead, and lay in the dark, listening to the rain. She was terribly afraid. Life was inimical again, and she had lost faith in herself, in her ability to be pert and to win success with the misty quality of her loveliness. Accepted things, long-established ideas, convictions, had failed. There was nothing to go on.... She began, reluctantly, almost with terror, to look herself straight in the face. She saw an image of herself, silly, vain, rushing in pursuit of unimportant things. Always things! And where had they gotten her?

A motor, turning into the Vincigliata road, cast a swinging light through the windows, across the walls, across Aphrodite, imponderable and secretive in her niche....

Flagg!

Her heart stopped.

They might have come to tell her....

No. The downstairs door opened, closed again, and she heard his footsteps, coming, coming....

She thought: “He’s been cruel. I ought to punish him.” But she called him.

She saw him in the doorway and summoned her half-glimpsed self with a passionate and peremptory cry. Flagg hesitated, a dim figure, silent, remote. Then he moved forward and, quivering, her nerves unsteady, she felt him leaning down over her. She could not see his face. She could smell the cloth of his coat, wet.... And with a sudden lifting of her arms, she dragged him down to her. He had to kneel. His face pressed into her throat. Again she felt his hair, the shape of his head. He was warm and alive; he was all of life. How could she have doubted, questioned, hesitated, when this, this was the answer to everything--to be near him.

“I thought you’d never come. I wanted to tell you that I’ll give the money to Robert, all of it. I understand.”

Flagg said nothing. He sighed. His body relaxed. He pressed his face closer against her. His arms went around her.... Lilah could feel the two cats frisking over her feet, and she thought: “They know. I’m happy. I’m happy.”

They clasped each other, for the first time, with that love which is pity and forgiving and ecstasy.