ong the flowers in the courtyard; he had lingered
by the market-stalls observing their exquisite, unprofitable trade. He
was telling not half the beauty that he recollected, save in a phrase
that he now and then dropped to the girl's manifest appetite for such
things, and he took a malign pleasure in painting, so to speak,
advertisement matter across the sky of his landscapes so that Mr. Philip
could swallow them as being of potential commercial value and not mere
foolish sensuous enjoyment. "There's so little real wealth in the
country that they have to buy and sell mere pretty things for God knows
what fraction of a farthing. On the stalls where you'd have cheap clocks
and crockery and Austrian glass, they had stacks of violets and
carnations--_violetas y claveles_...." Then a chill and a dimness passed
over the bright spectacle and a sunset flamed up half across the sky as
though light had been driven out of the gates by the sword and had
scaled the heaven that it might storm the city from above. The lanes
became little runnels of darkness and night slowly silted up the broader
streets. The incessant orgy of sound that by day had been but the
tuneless rattling of healthy throats and the chatter of castanets became
charged with tragedy by its passage through the grave twilight. The
people pressed about him like vivacious ghosts, differentiating
themselves from the dusk by wearing white flowers in their hair or
cherishing the glow-worm tip of a cigarette between their lips.

He remembered it very well. For that was a night that the torment of
loneliness had rushed in upon him, an experience of the pain that had
revisited him so often that a little more and he would be reconciled to
the idea of death. Even then he had been intelligent about the mood and
had known that his was not a loneliness that could be exorcised by any
of the beautiful brown bodies which here professed the arts of love and
the dance and that drunkenness which would bring a physical misery to
match his mental state. Though this was wisdom, it added to his sense of
being lost in black space like a wandering star. In the end he had gone
into a cafe and drunk manzanilla, and with the limp complaisance of a
wrecked seasick man whose raft has shivered and left him to the mercy of
an octopus he had suffered adoption by a party of German engineers, who
had made very merry with stories of tipsy priests and nuns who had not
lived up to their position as the br