Left to himself, Ulysses would suddenly realize the dual nature of his personality.  Then the man he was before that meeting in Pompeii would assert himself, and he would see his vessel and his home in Barcelona.

“What have you got yourself into?” he would ask himself remorsefully.  “How is all this affair ever going to turn out?...”

But at the sound of her footsteps in the next room, on perceiving the atmospheric wave produced by the displacement of her adorable body, this second person would fold itself back and a dark curtain would fall over his memory, leaving visible only the actual reality.

With the beatific smile of an opium-smoker, he would accept the impetuous caress of her lips, the entwining of her arms, strangling him like marble boas.

“Ulysses, my master!...  The moments that separate me from you weigh upon me like centuries!”

He, on the other hand, had lost all notion of time.  The days were all confused in his mind, and he had to keep asking in order to realize their passing.  After a week passed in the doctor’s home, he would sometimes suppose that the sweet sequestration had been but forty-eight hours long, at others that nearly a month had flitted by.

They went out very little.  The mornings slipped away insensibly between the late awakening and preparations for a breakfast made by themselves.  If it was necessary to go after some eatable forgotten the day before, it was she who took charge of the expedition, wishing to keep him from all contact with outside life.

The afternoons were afternoons of the harem, passed upon the divan or stretched on the floor.  In a low voice she would croon Oriental songs, incomprehensible and mysterious.  Suddenly she would spring up impetuously like a spring that is unwound, like a serpent that uncoils itself, and would begin to dance, almost without moving her feet, waving her lithe limbs....  And he would smile with stupefied infatuation, extending a right hand toward an Arabian tabaret, covered with bottles.

Freya took even greater care of the supply of liquor than of things to eat.  The sailor was half-drunk, but with a drunkenness wisely tempered that never went beyond the rose-colored period.  But he was so happy!...

They dined outside the house.  Sometimes their excursions were at midday and they would go to the restaurants of Posilipo or Vomero, the very places that he had known when he was a hopeless suppliant, and which saw him now with her hanging on his arm, with a proud air of possession.  If nightfall surprised them, they would hastily betake themselves to a cafe in the interior of the city, a beer-garden whose proprietor always spoke to Freya in German in a low voice.

Whenever the doctor was in Naples she would seat herself at their table, with the air of a good mother who is receiving her daughter and son-in-law.  Her scrutinizing glasses appeared to be searching Ferragut’s very soul, as though doubtful of his fidelity.  Then she would become more affectionate in the course of these banquets, composed of cold meats with a great abundance of drinks, in the German style.  For her, love was the most beautiful thing in existence, and she could not look upon these two enamored ones without a mist of emotion blurring the crystals of her second eyes.