fact that she was still
a beautiful and voluptuous woman, and that she belonged wholly to him.
And so gradually she woke up in him the peculiar and terrible need of
her that a certain type of woman can wake in a certain type of man. She
taught him to be grateful to her for a double joy: the moral joy of the
high-minded man who has, or who thinks he has, through a woman in some
degree fulfilled his ideal of conduct, and the physical joy of the
completely natural and vigorous man who legitimately links with his
moral satisfaction a satisfaction wholly different. To both spirit and
body she held the torch, and each was warmed by the glow, and made
cheerful and glad by the light.

Nigel had cared for her in England, had loved her in the Villa Androud;
but that care, that love, were as nothing to the feeling for her that
sprang up in him in the midst of the springing green things that made a
Paradise of the Fayyum. He was a man who got very near to Nature, whose
heart beat very near to Nature's generous heart, and often, when he
stood shoulder-high in a silver-green sea of sugar-cane, or looked up to
the tufted palms that made a murmuring over his head, or listened to the
rustle of corn in the sunshine, or to the swish of the heavily-podded
doura in the light wind that came in from the desert, he would compare
his growing love for Ruby to the growing of Nature's children in this
beneficent clime. And the luxuriant richness of the green world round
about him seemed to have its counterpart within him.

But there was the desert, too, always near to remind him of the arid
wastes of the world--of the arid wastes that needed reclaiming in
humanity, in himself.

And in his great joy he never lost one of his most beautiful natural
graces, the grace of an unostentatious humility.

The racial reticence of the Englishman about the things he cares for
most kept him from telling his wife of what was happening in his mind
and heart, despite his apparent frankness, which often seemed that of a
boy; and some of it she was too devoid of all spirituality, all moral
enthusiasm, to divine. But she summed him up pretty accurately, knew as
a rule pretty thoroughly "where she was with him"; and though she
sometimes wondered how things could be as they were in him, or in any
one, still she knew that so they were.

She acted her part well, though day by day, in the acting of it, her
nervous desperation increased; but when, now and then, her sel