“And lives that are unhappy?”

“What do you mean?”

“Can’t you mingle your life with them, or with one of them?”

He was silent, looking towards her.  She was wearing a very dark blue tea-gown of some thin material in which her thin body seemed lost.  He saw the dark folds of it flowing over the divan on which she was leaning, and trailing to the rug at her feet.  Her face was a faint whiteness under her colorless hair.  Her eyes were two darknesses in it.  He could not see them distinctly, but he knew they were looking intent and distressed.

“Haven’t you told me I look punished?” said the husky voice.

“Are you unhappy?” he asked.

“Do you think I have much reason to be happy?”

“You have your boy.”

“For a few weeks in the year.  I have lost my husband in a horrible way, worse than if he had died.  I live entirely alone.  I can’t marry again.  And yet I’m not at all old, and not at all finished.  But perhaps you have never really thought about my situation seriously.  After all, why should you?  Why should any one?  I won my case, and so of course it’s all right.”

“Are you unhappy, then?”

“What do you suppose about me?”

“I know you’ve gone through a great deal.  But you have your boy.”

There was a sound almost of dull obstinacy in his voice.

“Some women are not merely mothers, or potential mothers!” said an almost fierce voice.  “Some women are just women first and mothers second.  There are women who love men for themselves, not merely because men are possible child-bringers.  To a real and complete woman no child can ever be the perfect substitute for a husband or a lover.  Even nature has put the lover first and the child second.  I forbid you to say that I have my boy, as if that settled the question of my happiness.  I forbid you.”

He heard her breathing quickly.  Then she added: 

“But how could you be expected to understand women like me?”

The intensity of her sudden outburst startled him as the strength of the current in the Bosporus had startled him when he plunged into the sea from the Albanian’s boat.

“You have been brought up in another school,” she continued slowly, and with a sort of icy bitterness.  “I forgive you.”

She got up from the divan and went out upon the terrace, leaving him alone in the pavilion, which seemed suddenly colder when she had left it.

He did not follow her.  A breath from a human furnace had scorched him—­had scorched the nerve, and the nerve quivered.

“You have been brought up in a different school.”  Welsley and Stamboul—­Rosamund and Mrs. Clarke.  Once, somewhere, he had made that comparison.  As he sat in the pavilion it seemed to him that for a moment he heard the cool chiming of bells in a gray cathedral tower, the faint sound of the Dresden Amen.  But he looked out through the opening in the pavilion, and far down below he saw lights on the Bay of Buyukderer, the vague outlines of hills; and the perfume that came to him out of the night was not the damp smell of an English garden.