And they are very happy, breathlessly, feverishly happy.
Then they wake up with a memory of mutual giving-way that embitters and
humiliates when the inevitable longing for something more stable than
softness and breathlessness sets in.
Louis had not been drunk for three weeks; so many things had happened to
her, new things, charming things, adorable things and sad things since
they left the ship that she had almost sponged the memory of it from her
mind. The faculty that had been forced upon her in self defence during
her childhood, of forgetting hunger, hardness and repression the moment
she left the house and got out on to the wild hillside in the sun and
the wind came to her now with a kind of rapture. She had never, in her
childhood, dared to resent anything that hurt herself. This spirit of
non-resentment had become a habit of mind with her. She forgot--if she
ever realized--that Louis had hurt her, in the soft beauty of the
aurora, the silent fall of the night, the exhilaration of the roof with
its loneliness, its romance.
After awhile she went down the ladder and brought up grapes and
granadillas, and four candles. Louis looked disappointed: he would have
preferred mutton for supper, but for once said nothing as she stuck two
candles on the coping and two at the foot of the mattress, and lighted
them.
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