of Pontius Pilate and had watched through the carven windows the two stone women that pray for ever among the flowers in the courtyard; he had lingered by the market-stalls observing their exquisite, unprofitable trade.  He was telling not half the beauty that he recollected, save in a phrase that he now and then dropped to the girl’s manifest appetite for such things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak, advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere foolish sensuous enjoyment.  “There’s so little real wealth in the country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows what fraction of a farthing.  On the stalls where you’d have cheap clocks and crockery and Austrian glass, they had stacks of violets and carnations—­violetas y claveles....”  Then a chill and a dimness passed over the bright spectacle and a sunset flamed up half across the sky as though light had been driven out of the gates by the sword and had scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above.  The lanes became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader streets.  The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became charged with tragedy by its passage through the grave twilight.  The people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or cherishing the glow-worm tip of a cigarette between their lips.

He remembered it very well.  For that was a night that the torment of loneliness had rushed in upon him, an experience of the pain that had revisited him so often that a little more and he would be reconciled to the idea of death.  Even then he had been intelligent about the mood and had known that his was not a loneliness that could be exorcised by any of the beautiful brown bodies which here professed the arts of love and the dance and that drunkenness which would bring a physical misery to match his mental state.  Though this was wisdom, it added to his sense of being lost in black space like a wandering star.  In the end he had gone into a cafe and drunk manzanilla, and with the limp complaisance of a wrecked seasick man whose raft has shivered and left him to the mercy of an octopus he had suffered adoption by a party of German engineers, who had made very merry with stories of tipsy priests and nuns who had not lived up to their position as the brides of Christ.  Dismal night, forerunner of a hundred such.  “Oh, God, what is the use of it all?  I sit here yarning to this damned little dwarf of a solicitor and this girl who is sick to go to these countries from which I’ve come back cold and famined....”