Aaron and Manfredi kept their faces averted from one another and hardly spoke to one another.  It was as if two invisible hands pushed their faces apart, away, averted.  And Aaron’s face glimmered with a little triumph, and a little grimace of obstinacy.  And the Italian’s face looked old, rather monkey-like, and of a deep, almost stone-bare bitterness.  The woman looked wondering from one man to the other—­ wondering.  The glimmer of the open flower, the wonder-look, still lasted.  And Aaron said in his heart, what a goodly woman, what a woman to taste and enjoy.  Ah, what a woman to enjoy!  And was it not his privilege?  Had he not gained it?

His manhood, or rather his maleness, rose powerfully in him, in a sort of mastery.  He felt his own power, he felt suddenly his own virile title to strength and reward.  Suddenly, and newly flushed with his own male super-power, he was going to have his reward.  The woman was his reward.  So it was, in him.  And he cast it over in his mind.  He wanted her—­ha, didn’t he!  But the husband sat there, like a soap-stone Chinese monkey, greyish-green.  So, it would have to be another time.

He rose, therefore, and took his leave.

“But you’ll let us do that again, won’t you?” said she.

“When you tell me, I’ll come,” said he.

“Then I’ll tell you soon,” said she.

So he left, and went home to his own place, and there to his own remote room.  As he laid his flute on the table he looked at it and smiled.  He remembered that Lilly had called it Aaron’s Rod.

“So you blossom, do you?—­and thorn as well,” said he.

For such a long time he had been gripped inside himself, and withheld.  For such a long time it had been hard and unyielding, so hard and unyielding.  He had wanted nothing, his desire had kept itself back, fast back.  For such a long time his desire for woman had withheld itself, hard and resistant.  All his deep, desirous blood had been locked, he had wanted nobody, and nothing.  And it had been hard to live, so.  Without desire, without any movement of passionate love, only gripped back in recoil!  That was an experience to endure.

And now came his desire back.  But strong, fierce as iron.  Like the strength of an eagle with the lightning in its talons.  Something to glory in, something overweening, the powerful male passion, arrogant, royal, Jove’s thunderbolt.  Aaron’s black rod of power, blossoming again with red Florentine lilies and fierce thorns.  He moved about in the splendour of his own male lightning, invested in the thunder of the male passion-power.  He had got it back, the male godliness, the male godhead.