Everywhere he would meet men whom he had captained on desperate adventures, who over wine would point ringed fingers at mountain ranges and whisper of forgotten mines and tempt him to adventures that would take him away from her for ever so long.  Everywhere he would meet women, hateful feminine women of the sort who are opposed to Woman Suffrage, who, because of some past courtesy of his, would throw him roses and try to make him watch their dancing feet.  She sobbed with rage as she perceived how different from her the possession of this past made him.  When he reached Rio he would not stand by the quiet bay as she would have stood, enraptured by the several noble darknesses of the sky, the mountains, and the ship-starred sea, but would go quickly to his house on the hill, not hurrying, but showing by a lightness in his walk, by a furtive vivacity of his body, that he was involved in some private system of exciting memories.  He would open the wrought-iron gates with a key which she had not known he possessed, which had lain close to him in one of those innumerable pockets that men have in their clothes.  With perfect knowledge of the path, he would step silently through the garden, where flowers run wild had lost their delicacy and grew as monstrous candelabra of coarsened blooms in soil greenly feculent with weeds; she rejoiced in its devastation.  He would enter the hall and pick his steps between the pools of wine that lay black on the marble floor; he would tread on the rosettes of corruption that had once been garlands of roses hung about the bronze whale’s neck; he would look down on the white limbs of the shattered Venus, and look up and listen to the creaking flight of the birds of prey that were nesting under the broken roof; and he would smile as if he shared a secret with the ruin and dissipation.  His smile was the sun, but in it there was always a dark ray of secrecy.  All his experience was a mockery of her inexperience.  Her clenched fist beat her brow, which had become hot....

All that day her mind had painfully enacted such fantasies of hatred or had waited blankly for this moment which the old man’s shuffling step was now bringing towards her.  She braced herself, though she did not look up from the table.

“Nelly, I’ve brought you a bit rock from Ferguson’s.”

She gazed cannily at the white paper parcel.  It was the largest box he had ever given her; he always gave her sweeties when Mr. Philip had been talking against her.  Ought she therefore to deduce from the unusual size that he had been saying something unusually cruel?  But, on the other hand, surely no one could ever give sweeties to a girl if they thought she had let herself be kissed.  “You’re just too kind, Mr. James,” she said mournfully.