rudence Varley was there, sketching. The
leisureliness of her greeting seemed to take him for granted, to
relegate him, almost, to part of the scenery. He speculated momentarily
on the change in his own attitude towards this abstraction; how it had
been to him once the absent remoteness of one interested mainly in
things; how it was to him now the remoteness, not absent, but very
deliberate, of one whose realization of and discrimination between
'sorts of people' was quite complete. It certainly might well have been
clear to him from the first; there seemed no obscurity in it.

And here again they were together, looking over the spread of Naples.
Before, he had swept his hand towards it and said, 'Do you like it?'

He had been pleased on that evening by what he had considered an
advance, however slight, in the achievement of intimacy. He had
flattered himself that she was slowly unbarring the gates. Once or
twice, after that evening, he had, he had thought, induced the removal
of a few more bars.

Now, standing outside the shut gates, having realized of what they were
built, he flushed slowly to his forehead.

And then, even as he turned away, the old desire swept over him,
ironically new in form. He would not batter at the gates again; that was
done with. But he must, it was borne in upon him, show that he moved no
more in the old mists of crass ignorance, show that he knew, even as she
did, of the gates, their nature and their inexorability. That she should
continue to think that he knew nothing was not to be borne.

So, turning, he checked himself, and stood still a little behind her,
and looked down over the great tinted city circling the blue bay--her
Naples, 'colour and light and shadow, and the way the streets go, cut
like deep gorges, and climbing up.'

Looking over it, Tommy said, with surprising abruptness:

'You said once--or I said--that your Naples was different from mine.'

She glanced round at him for a moment, with her usual unadorned 'Yes.'

'And I didn't know then,' he went on, 'how much it was true. I think you
perhaps knew I didn't know it. And now I should like you to know that I
have learnt that much; that I'm not quite--not quite a b-blind ass. I
know more or less how we stand--how we must always stand. That's all. I
wanted you to know that I see them--all the things ... the things you've
seen all along.... I wanted you to know.... Oh, there's nothing you can
say....'

Thus the melancho