Freya turned her back, as if the memory of her passage through that den offended her.

The old waiter now devoted himself to them, beginning to serve dinner.  To the bottle of Vesuvian wine had succeeded another kind, gradually losing its contents.

The two ate little but felt a nervous thirst which made them frequently reach out their hands toward the glass.  The wine was depressing to Freya.  The sweetness of the twilight seemed to make it ferment, giving it the acrid perfume of sad memories.

The sailor felt arising within him the aggressive fever of temperate men when becoming intoxicated.  Had he been with a man he would have started a violent discussion on any pretext whatever.  He did not relish the oysters, the sailor’s soup, the lobster, everything that another time, eaten alone or with a passing friend in the same site, would have appeared to him as delicacies.

He was looking at Freya with enigmatical eyes while, in his thought, wrath was beginning to bubble.  He almost hated her on recalling the arrogance with which she had treated him, fleeing from that room.  “Hypocrite!...”  She was just amusing herself with him.  She was a playful and ferocious cat prolonging the death-agony of the mouse caught in her claws.  In his brain a brutal voice was saying, as though counseling a murder:  “This will be her last day!...  I’ll finish her to-day!...  No more after to-day!...”  After several repetitions, he was disposed to the greatest violence in order to extricate himself from a situation which he thought ridiculous.

And she, ignorant of her companion’s thought, deceived by the impassiveness of his countenance, continued chatting with her glance fixed on the horizon, talking in an undertone as though she were recounting to herself her illusions.

The momentary suggestion of living in a cottage of Posilipo, completely alone, an existence of monastic isolation with all the conveniences of modern life, was dominating her like an obsession.

“And yet, after all,” she continued, “this atmosphere is not favorable to solitude; this landscape is for love.  To grow old slowly, two who love each other, before the eternal beauty of the gulf!...  What a pity that I have never been really loved!...”

This was an offense against Ulysses who expressed his annoyance with all the aggressiveness that was seething beneath his bad humor.  How about him?...  Was he not loving her and disposed to prove it to her by all manner of sacrifices?...

Sacrifices as proof of love always left this woman cold, accepting them with a skeptical gesture.

“All men have told me the same thing,” she added; “they all promise to kill themselves if I do not love them....  And with the most of them it is nothing more than a phrase of passionate rhetoric.  And what if they did kill themselves really?  What does that prove?...  To leave life on the spur of a moment that gives no opportunity for repentance;—­a simple nervous flash, a posture many times assumed simply for what people will say, with the frivolous pride of an actor who likes to pose in graceful attitudes.  I know what all that means.  A man once killed himself for me....”