“Not you,” he said.  “I feel it.  You are so independent, so sure.  Where are your hesitations?  Your very doubts are challenges to truth.”

“Challenges to truth,” she said.  “It is a nice phrase.”

Driving back into the sunset they were silent.  He wrapped her cloak round her, and once he kissed her hand, but it didn’t feel as if it belonged to her.  Her thoughts had taken her right away out of his presence, out of the carriage beyond the sunset.  Where had they taken her?  He wondered.

* * * * *

That night she came down, dressed in glowing apricot—­“fold after fold to the fainting air.”

As always, her clothes seemed part of her, without ends or beginnings, flowing from her, a streaming enhancing accompaniment.  He asked her if her dress were nymphe emue or feuille morte.  He was proud of knowing those two names.  She said it was neither.  He begged her to tell him, but she refused rather abruptly to discuss it.  He said he loved her clothes—­that he would like to know....

“Pour l’amour de Dieu, ne parlons pas robes.”

He wondered at her irritability, but he obeyed.

They went out on to the terrace.  The sea was black and angry, all the waves at cross purposes.

“What is your name?”

“Paula.”

“What will you say when I tell you that I love you, that I want you?”

“You won’t tell me because you will know that I don’t want you to.”

Her voice was a part of the wind.

“Why don’t you want me to?” he was urgent—­harsh with desire.

“Because it all happened twenty-five years ago.”

He didn’t understand.

“Because—­because there are some things you can’t do twice—­like your book, they are the big things that create a strength of resistance.  Because they are the beautiful things that belong to our dreams.  Because they are of a magic fabric, into which you can weave no facts.”

It was dark and he could not see her.  The end of his cigarette was a bright spot in the night.  The sea and the wind were the counterpoint of her voice.

He felt unreal and remote and small.  A tiny strand in the vast design of destiny.

She got up and walked in.  He did not move.

* * * * *

“Thank you for the flowers.”

The sun was glittering frivolous and cynical.

The box he had ordered from Paris had arrived.  First there was a mass of Juliette roses—­gilt and velvet—­then a staircase of sweet peas, flame-coloured, coral, crimson, magenta, purple, bronze and black.

Both together they drank in the blaze of colour.

Ecstatically he said to her,

“You can’t thank me, can you?  They are too beautiful.”

“Perhaps not,” she said, “but it was beauty unleashed by you.”

He looked at her with adoring eyes.  She gave you phrases which lit torches in your soul.