y recovered an external impassiveness. He sat
down, and considered:

"How naive I was. That's when the sentimentalism gushes out, at the
end of long journeys, at the novelty of elegance and sophistication.
One deifies them then: one gives them a place much larger than they
ought to take up in life. How Muene-Motapa would laugh! He, virtually
a Neolithic man, never sinks below manly thoughts: his ambitions are
never enfeebled by the malady of sentimental love. So when he suffers
it is like a man, not like a descendant of medieval mystics and
_cavalieri serventi_."

His body relaxed, and he muttered:

"A bit of romance for her in imitation of some favorite play or book.
An emotional hour with the man from Africa--and now a musical fellow."

After a sharp expulsion of his breath he resumed that immobility which
extended even to his eyes. He recalled the thoughts of her that had
filled his captivity, all his memories of their union which had gained,
from "the pathos of distance," and from the passage of time, an
immaterial, an ideal, nobility, till at last, in the poetic fancy of
his lonely heart, she had become more remote and diffuse than the
moonlight on the mountain peaks, more intoxicating and elusive than the
odors of the equatorial flowers, an influence rather than a woman, a
vague hope, a sort of sanative faith.

It was, he reflected, all one with the romanticism that had driven him
to those many wanderings, the longing for what was so dissimilar to him
and yet intensely congenial--the magical deserts where one suffered
from heat and thirst, the gaudy jungles where death lay in wait for
one, the woman who concealed beneath an appearance of perfection an
incapacity for a decent period of grief. Ah, there was the perfidy
more deadly to him than all the plagues and vipers and weapons of
Africa!

He felt a profound revulsion from his own nature, which was flawed with
this sentimentalism, this jejune expectancy. At nightfall, rising
wearily from his chair, he wondered how he was to go on living with
himself.

"And after all is it her fault? I was dead. No doubt she shed some
tears. Because I loved her I expected too much of her."

Through the casement he saw a world fading away beneath clouds as black
as ink. A purplish-gray wall of rain was swiftly approaching the fort.
A pink fork of lightning stood out against the clouds: the crash of
thunder was followed by a noise like a thousand waterfalls; an