Artois had seen
Ruffo with his mother. A number of tables were set out, but there were
few people sitting at them. She felt tired. She crossed the road, went
to a table, and sat down. A waiter came up and asked her what she would
have.

"Acqua fresca," she said.

He looked surprised.

"Oh--then wine, vermouth--anything!"

He looked more surprised.

"Will you have vermouth, Signora?"

"Yes, yes--vermouth."

He brought her vermouth and iced water. She mixed them together and
drank. But she was not conscious of tasting anything. For a considerable
time she sat there. People passed her. The trams rushed by. On several
of them were printed the words she had looked for in vain at the
station. But she did not notice them.

During this time she did not feel unhappy. Seldom had she felt calmer,
more at rest, more able to be still. She had no desire to do anything.
It seemed to her that she would be quite satisfied to sit where she was
in the sun forever.

While she sat there she was always thinking, but vaguely, slowly,
lethargically. And her thoughts reiterated themselves, were like
recurring fragments of dreams, and were curiously linked together. The
green parrot she always connected with the death-charm, because the
latter had once been green. Whenever the one presented itself to her
mind it was immediately followed by the other. The shawl at which the
old woman's yellow fingers had perpetually pulled led her mind to
the thought of the tunnel, because she imagined that the latter must
eventually end in blackness, and the shawl was black. She knew, of
course, really that the tunnel was lit from end to end by electricity.
But her mind arbitrarily put aside this knowledge. It did not belong to
her strange mood, the mood of one drawing near to the verge either of
some abominable collapse or of some terrible activity. Occasionally, she
thought of Ruffo; but always as one of the brown boys bathing from the
rocks beyond the harbor, shouting, laughing, triumphant in his glorious
youth. And when the link was, as it were, just beginning to form itself
from the thought-shape of youth to another thought-shape, her mind
stopped short in that progress, recoiled, like a creature recoiling from
a precipice it has not seen but has divined in the dark. She sipped the
vermouth and the iced water, and stared at the drops chasing each other
down the clouded glass. And for a time she was not conscious where she
was, and heard none of