ld not consent
to it."

Her wrath burst forth without any finesse, with the frankness of
intimacy. She always hated Toni. "Hideous old faun!..." From the very
first moment she had suspected that he would prove an enemy.

"But you are master of your own boat," she continued. "You can do what
you want to, and you don't need his permission to sail."

When Ulysses furthermore said that he was not sure of his crew either,
and that the voyage was impossible, the woman again became furious at
him. She appeared to have grown suddenly ten years older. To the sailor
she seemed to have another face, of an ashy pallor, with furrowed
brows, eyes filled with angry tears, and a light foam in the corners of
her mouth.

"Braggart.... Fraud.... Southerner! Meridional!"

Ulysses tried to calm her. It might be possible to find another boat.
He would try to help them find another. He was going to send the _Mare
Nostrum_ to await him in Barcelona, and he himself would stay in
Naples, just as long as she wished him to.

"Buffoon!... And I believed in you! And I yielded myself to you,
believing you to be a hero, believing your offer of sacrifice to be the
truth!..."

She marched off, furious, giving the door a spiteful slam.

"She is going to see the doctor," thought Ferragut. "It is all over."

He regretted the loss of this woman, even after having seen her in her
tragic and fleeting ugliness. At the same time, the injurious word, the
cutting insults with which she had accompanied her departure caused
sharp pain. He already was tired and sick of hearing himself called
"meridional," as though it were a stigma.

Yet he rather relished his enforced happiness, the sensation of false
liberty which every enamored person feels after a quarrelsome break.
"Now to live again!..." He wished to return at once to the ship, but
feared a revival of the memories evoked by silence. It would be better
to remain in Naples, to go to the theater, to trust to the luck of some
chance encounter just as when he used to come ashore for a few hours.
The next morning he would leave the hotel, with all his baggage, and
before sunset he would be sailing the open sea.

He ate outside of the _albergo_, and he passed the night elbowing women
in cabarets where an insipid variety show served as a pretext to
disguise the baser object. The recollection of Freya, fresh-looking and
gay, kept rising between him and those painted mouths every time that
they smiled upon