ble--nonsense
having failed--he was silent for an unusual minute, to let the night
sink in: the broad stillness of the sea below the high road, with the
moon cutting its silver lane across it; Naples curving round the water's
edge, a great cluster of sparkling jewels; far off across the bay the
red glowing column above Vesuvius, that flared and darkened and flared
again. To the persistent tinkle of the mandolins below a tenor voice
sang 'Addio, bella Napoli!'

Tommy, having given the impression its chance of absorption, inquired:

'Do you like it?'

She turned to him a little absently, and the glow across the water
seemed to strike high-lights in her eyes.

'What?'

He swept his hand towards it.

'Naples--all that.'

'Yes.' She had a faculty of conveying all she meant by a simple
affirmative or negative; it is, if one comes to think of it, a habit
rather rare; most people supplement or qualify or explain. She added:
'The little of it I see. It's not much.'

Tommy enlarged; he would force personality into it.

'It's not my Naples. Mine is different.'

She assented, 'I know,' and he realized with triumph that she had
accepted the personal element; she had hitherto always passed it blankly
by.

'My Naples,' she said, 'isn't human; it's colour, and light and shadow,
and the way the streets go--cut like deep gorges and climbing up--you
know? I'm getting to know that a little. But that's Naples in one sense
only--one meaning. The people who live in it I don't know.'

'You don't want to know them, do you?'

Having found the personal tack for once, Tommy adhered to it.

'Well----'

Her considering silence seemed to discriminate delicately between the
various types of 'the people who live in it.' It seemed that one might
want to know some and not others.

'You don't care about knowing people, only things,' Tommy told her.

She accepted it in silence. Discrimination between 'people' would
hardly, in the circumstances, have been courteous. Her next remark was a
swerve, as usual, to 'things.'

'Oh, look there!... Some one told me it hadn't been so excited for
years. I wonder if it means anything by it.'

Tommy left the achievement of further intimacy for another occasion. He
meant to carry it through. That was a few days before he had 'helped her
to look for her cousin all over the place.' During that search he had
found her a little abstracted; she had not appeared to be listening to
him much. Her habit o