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hair until her head moved with it. Other women have had
lovers—the same forces that last night had made her yield
to Dick up to the point of death, now kept her head nod-
ding to the wind, content and happy with the logic of, Why
shouldn’t I?
She sat upon the low wall and looked down upon the
sea. But from another sea, the wide swell of fantasy, she
had fished out something tangible to lay beside the rest of
her loot. If she need not, in her spirit, be forever one with
Dick as he had appeared last night, she must be something
in addition, not just an image on his mind, condemned to
endless parades around the circumference of a medal.
Nicole had chosen this part of the wall on which to sit,
because the cliff shaded to a slanting meadow with a culti-
vated vegetable garden. Through a cluster of boughs she saw
two men carrying rakes and spades and talking in a coun-
terpoint of Niçoise and Provençal. Attracted by their words
and gestures she caught the sense:
‘I laid her down here.’
‘I took her behind the vines there.’
‘She doesn’t care—neither does he. It was that sacred
dog. Well, I laid her down here—‘
‘You got the rake?’
‘You got it yourself, you clown.’
‘Well, I don’t care where you laid her down. Until that
night I never even felt a woman’s breast against my chest
since I married— twelve years ago. And now you tell me—‘
‘But listen about the dog—‘
Nicole watched them through the boughs; it seemed all

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