A pervading weakness fell on her; her arms, which had somehow become linked round his neck, were now as soft as garlands, her knees failed under her shivering body; but through her mind thundered grandiose convictions of new power.  There was no sea, however black with chill and depth, in which she would not dive to save him, no desert whose unwatered sands she would not travel if so she served his need.  It was as if already some brown arm had thrown a spear and she had flung herself before him and blissfully received the flying steel into her happy flesh.  Love began to travel over her body, lighting here and there little fires of ecstasy, making her adore him with her skin as she had always adored him with her heart.  And as the life of her nerves became more and more intense, her sensations more and more luminous, she became less conscious of her materiality.  At the end she felt like a flash of lightning.  From that moment she sank confused into the warm darkness of his embrace, while above her his voice muttered hesitant with solemnity:  “Ellen ... you are the answer ... to everything....”

They drew apart and stood far off, looking into each other’s eyes.  The clock, ticking away time, seemed a curious toy.  “You.  In this little room.  Oh, Ellen, it is a miracle,” he said.

Pressing her hands together beneath her chin, she smiled.

“Ah, you are so beautiful!  Your hair.  Your eyes.  The little white ball of your chin.  As a matter of hard fact, you are more beautiful than I’ve ever imagined anybody else to be.  The wildest lies I’ve ever told myself about the women I’ve wanted to love are true of you.”  For a moment he was still, thinking of Mariquita de Rojas as a swimmer might look down through fathoms of clear water on the face of a drowned woman.  “But you ... you are beautiful as ... as an impersonal thing....”  He clenched his fists in exasperation.  All his life the one gift he had exercised easily and indubitably, not losing it even when his besetting despair stood between him and the sun, was the power to talk.  While he was speaking the dominoes lay untouched on the greasy cafe table; men bent forward on their elbows that with his tongue he might make them companions of men who were half the world distant, maybe the whole world distant in their graves, that he might warm them with the beams of a sun long set on a horizon they would never see.  That was vanity; or, more justly, the filling in of dangerously empty hours, holes in existence through which it seemed likely the soul might run out.  But now, when it was absolutely necessary that he should tell her what she was to him, he could not talk at all.  He stuttered on to try to win in the way he knew her generous heart could be won by a statement of her new joy.