The river was like a dream, she thought.  The great boats, with their lateen sails and their grave groups of silent brown men, crept noiselessly by like the vessels that pass in a dream.  Against the sides of the Loulia she heard the Nile water whispering softly, whispering surely to her.  From the near bank, mingling with the loud and nasal song of the Nubian sailors, rose the fierce and almost tragic songs of the fellahin working the shadufs.  How many kinds of lives there were in the world!

The blow that had fallen upon Mrs. Armine had made her unusually thoughtful, unusually introspective, unusually sensitive to all influences from without; had left her vibrating like a musical instrument that had been powerfully struck by a ruthless hand.  The gust of fury that had shaken her had stirred her to a fierce and powerful life, had roused up all her secret energies of temper, of will of desire, all her greed to get the best out of life, to wring dry, as it were, of their golden juices every one of the fleeting years.  “To-morrow we die.”  Those who believe that, as she believed it, desire to live as no believer in a prolonged future in other worlds can ever desire to live—­here, for the little day—­and never had she felt that hungry wish more than she felt it now.  Through her dream she felt it, almost as a victim of ardent pain feels that pain, without suffering under it, after an injection of morphia.  If she could not have the life to which she had looked forward of triumph in England, she must have in its place some other life that suited her special temperament, some other life that would answer to the call within her for material satisfactions, for strong bodily pleasures, for the joys of the pagan, the unbeliever, who is determined to “make the most of” the short span of human life on earth.

How could she now have that other life with Nigel?  He would never be Lord Harwich.  He would never be anything but Nigel Armine, a man of moderate means interested in Egyptian agriculture, with a badly let property in England, and a strip of desert in the Fayyum.  He would never be anything except that—­and her husband, the man who had “let her in.”  She did not mentally add to the tiny catalogue—­“and the man who loved her.”

For a long while she sat quite still, leaning her head on the cushion, hearing the singing and crying voices, the perpetual whisper of the water against the Loulia’s sides, watching the gleaming Nile and the vessels that crept upon it going towards the south; and now, for the first time, there woke in her a desire to follow them up the river, to sail, too, into the golden south.  Instead of the longing to return to and reign in England, came the desire to push England out of her life, almost to kick it away scornfully and have done with it for ever.  Since she could never reign in England, she felt that she hated England.

“In the summer?  Oh, I always spend the summer in England.”