“Poor little boy,” she whispered, and he liked it.

The waters of the harbour began to deepen to indigo:  the sun went down behind the roofs of the city at their side.  There was a faint faraway crackling in the air as of straw and twigs burning in a fierce fire; the sky was flooded with streamers of mauve and green, gold and rosy light that flickered over the bed of the sinking sun for an hour or more instead of leaving the sky suddenly grey as it usually was after the rapid twilight.  The sundown bugle called down the flag on the masthead of the flagship, and the headlights twinkled out.  Marcella and Louis grew very quiet as the streets quietened and only an occasional car clanged by in George Street, an occasional band of singing sailors went back rollicking down the street, a solitary ferry glided along in the water, with brilliant reflections and blaring German band.  She crept a little closer to him; when he did not speak she forgot, for the while, the chasm between them.  It is so easy not to criticize anything seen through veils of glamour.  People socially, spiritually and mentally worlds apart can love violently for a while when there is physical attraction.  And they are very happy, breathlessly, feverishly happy.  Then they wake up with a memory of mutual giving-way that embitters and humiliates when the inevitable longing for something more stable than softness and breathlessness sets in.

Louis had not been drunk for three weeks; so many things had happened to her, new things, charming things, adorable things and sad things since they left the ship that she had almost sponged the memory of it from her mind.  The faculty that had been forced upon her in self defence during her childhood, of forgetting hunger, hardness and repression the moment she left the house and got out on to the wild hillside in the sun and the wind came to her now with a kind of rapture.  She had never, in her childhood, dared to resent anything that hurt herself.  This spirit of non-resentment had become a habit of mind with her.  She forgot—­if she ever realized—­that Louis had hurt her, in the soft beauty of the aurora, the silent fall of the night, the exhilaration of the roof with its loneliness, its romance.

After awhile she went down the ladder and brought up grapes and granadillas, and four candles.  Louis looked disappointed:  he would have preferred mutton for supper, but for once said nothing as she stuck two candles on the coping and two at the foot of the mattress, and lighted them.  They burnt unnickering in the windless, blue air.

It was the setting of romance.  Dreams, play-acting came back.  Breaking off a bunch of grapes for Louis she said: 

“This is a roof garden in Babylon.  You’re a king.  Oh no, it’s Jerusalem.  I’m Bethsaibe, bathing on the roof and you’re King David.  You’ve got to fall in love with me.”