They burnt unnickering in the windless, blue air.
It was the setting of romance. Dreams, play-acting came back. Breaking
off a bunch of grapes for Louis she said:
"This is a roof garden in Babylon. You're a king. Oh no, it's Jerusalem.
I'm Bethsaibe, bathing on the roof and you're King David. You've got to
fall in love with me."
Louis was too self-centred, too introspective to make love to anyone; it
was only alcohol that released unconscious longings in him: he had
never, consciously, loved anything on earth: his desperate pleadings
with Marcella on the ship had been pleadings for a mother, a caretaker
rather than for a lover. His gross suggestions when he was drunk--the
relics of his boyish first sex adventure--she did not understand. Nor
did she understand why, when he had lain drunk and asleep that first
night in the room below, she had looked at him feeling choked to tears;
why she sat up at night watching him as he slept, vaguely discomforted
and distressed; why she looked at him with blinded eyes. Had Louis not
roused first her mother love to guard his helplessness, he would never
have got into close enough touch with her to rouse the physical passion
which might have thus slept on for long years. All her frowning,
bewildered self-analysis could not explain the whirlpool of sensations
into which she had fallen, which alternately buffeted her with vague
unhappiness and drew her along to ecstasies.
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