“I thought you wanted to cry,” I remarked.

“I can’t,” said Carlotta, plaintively.

“And you won’t tell me why you exclude me from your universal hatred?”

Carlotta dug up the sand with the point of her foot.  The sight of it recalled the row of pink toes thrust unashamedly before my eyes on the second day of her arrival in London.  An old hope, an old fear, an old struggle renewed themselves.  She was more adorably beautiful even than the Carlotta of the pink tus, and spiritually she was reborn.  I heard her whisper: 

“I can’t.”

Now I had sworn to myself all the oaths that a man can swear that I should be Carlotta’s grandfather to the end of time.  Hitherto I had felt the part.  Now suddenly grey beard and slippered pantaloons are cast aside and I am young again with a glow in my heart which beats fast at her beauty.  I shut my teeth.

“No,” said I to myself.  “The curtain shall not rise on that farcical tragedy again.”

I threw the reins on the neck of Carlotta’s mule, which with its companion had been regarding us with bland stupidity.

“I think we had better ride on, Carlotta,” I said.  “Mount.”

She meekly gave me her little foot and I hoisted her into the saddle.

We did not exchange a word till we reached Mogador.  But each of us felt that something had happened.

At dinner we met as usual.  Carlotta spoke somewhat feverishly of our travels, and asked me numberless questions, betraying an unprecedented thirst for information.  I never gave her historical instruction with less zest.

After the meal we went onto the flat roof.  Carlotta poured out my coffee at the small table beside the long Madeira cane chair which was my accustomed seat.  The starlit night was blue and languorous.  From some cafe came the monotonous strains of Moorish music, the harsh strings and harsh men’s voices softened by the distance.  Carlotta took my coffee-cup when I had finished and set it down in her granddaughterly way.  Then she stood in front of me.

“Won’t you make a little room for me on your chair, Seer Marcous, darling?”

I shifted my feet from the foot-rest and she sat down.  I may observe that I was not, in oriental bashawdom, occupying the one and only chair on the housetop.

“Tell me about the stars,” she said.

I knew what she meant.  She loved the old Greek myths; their poetry, obscured though it was through my matter-of-fact prose, appealed to her young imagination.  She was passing through an exquisite phase of development.

I scanned the heavens for a text and found one in the Pleiades.  And I told her how these were seven daughters of Atlas and Pleione who herself was the daughter of the Sea, and how they were all pure maidens, save one, and were the companions of Artemis; how Orion the hunter, who was afterwards slain by Artemis and whose three-starred girdle gleamed up there in the sky, pursued them with evil intent, and how they prayed the gods for deliverance and were changed into the everlasting stars; and, lastly, how the one who was not a maiden, for she loved a mortal, shrank away from her sisters through shame and was invisible to the eye of man.