* * * * *

People talked around him.  He talked and did not know his own words.  Marise spun those sparkling webs of nonsense of hers, and made him laugh, but the next moment he could not have told what she had said.  He must somehow have been very tired to take such intense pleasure in being at rest.

Her husband came, that rough and energetic husband.  The children came, the children whose restless, selfish, noisy preying on their mother usually annoyed him so, and still the charm was not broken.  Marise, as she always did when her husband and children were there, retreated into a remote plane of futile busyness with details that servants should have cared for; answering the children’s silly questions, belonging to everyone, her personal existence blotted out.  But this time he felt still, deep within him, the penetrating sweetness of her eyes as she had looked at him.

A tiresome, sophisticated friend of Marise’s came, too, somehow intruding another personality into the circle, already too full, and yet he was but vaguely irritated by her.  She only brought out by contrast the thrilling quality of Marise’s golden presence.  He basked in that, as in the sunshine, and thought of nothing else.

Possibilities he had never dreamed of, stretched before him, possibilities of almost impersonal and yet desirable existence.  Perhaps this was the turning-point of his life.  He supposed there really was one, sometime, for everybody.

* * * * *

“. . .  Rocca di Papa . . .” someone had said.  Or had he dreamed it?  He awoke with an inward bound, like a man springing up from sleep at a sudden noise.  His first look was for Marise.  She was pale.  He had not dreamed it.

The voice went on . . . the newcomer’s, the one they called Eugenia . . . yes, she had known them in Italy.  Marise had just said they had been friends before her marriage.

The voice went on.  How he listened as though crouched before the keyhole of a door!  Only three or four sentences, quite casual and trivial in content, pronounced in that self-consciously cosmopolitan accent.  Then the voice stopped.

It had said enough for him.  Now he knew.  Now he had that clue.

He had the sensation of rising to his full height, exultantly, every faculty as alert as though he had never been drugged to sleep by those weak notions of renunciation.  The consciousness of power was like a sweet taste in his mouth.  The deep, fundamental, inalienable need for possession stretched itself, titanic and mighty, refreshed, reposed, and strengthened by the involuntary rest it had had.

* * * * *

He fixed his eyes on Marise, waiting for the first interchange of a look.  He could see that her hands were trembling; and smiled to himself.  She was looking at the old man.

Now, in a moment she would look at him.