Septimus | Page 9

matches. Finding none, he threw the cigarette into the
road.
"That's just like you," cried Zora. "Why didn't you ask the cabman for a
light?"

She laughed at him with an odd sense of intimacy, though she had
known him for scarcely an hour. He seemed rather a stray child than a
man. She longed to befriend him--to do something for him,
motherwise--she knew not what. Her adventure by now had failed to be
adventurous. The spice of danger had vanished. She knew she could sit
beside this helpless being till the day of doom without fear of
molestation by word or act.
He obtained a light for his cigarette from the cabman and smoked in
silence. Gradually the languor of the night again stole over her senses,
and she forgot his existence. The carriage had turned homeward, and at
a bend of the road, high up above the sea, Monte Carlo came into view,
gleaming white far away below, like a group of fairy palaces lit by fairy
lamps, sheltered by the great black promontory of Monaco. From the
gorge on the left, the terraced rock on the right, came the smell of the
wild thyme and rosemary and the perfume of pale flowers. The touch of
the air on her cheek was a warm and scented kiss. The diamond stars
drooped towards her like a Danaë shower. Like Danaë's, her lips were
parted. Her eyes strained far beyond the stars into an unknown glory,
and her heart throbbed with a passionate desire for unknown things. Of
what nature they might be she did not dream. Not love. Zora
Middlemist had forsworn it. Not the worship of a man. She had vowed
by all the saints in her hierarchy that no man should ever again enter
her life. Her soul revolted against the unutterable sex.
As soon as one realizes the exquisite humbug of sublunary existence he
must weep for the pity of it.
The warm and scented air was a kiss, too, on the cheek of Septimus Dix;
and his senses, too, were enthralled by the witchery of the night. But
for him stars and scented air and the magic beauty of the sea were
incarnate in the woman by his side.
Zora, as I have said, had forgotten the poor devil's existence.
CHAPTER III
When they drove up to the Hôtel de Paris, she alighted and bade him a

smiling farewell, and went to her room with the starlight in her eyes.
The lift man asked if Madame had won. She dangled her empty purse
and laughed. Then the lift man, who had seen that light in women's
eyes before, made certain that she was in love, and opened the lift door
for her with the confidential air of the Latin who knows sweet secrets.
But the lift man was wrong. No man had a part in her soul's exultation.
If Septimus Dix crossed her mind while she was undressing, it was as a
grotesque, bearing the same relation to her emotional impression of the
night as a gargoyle does to a cathedral. When she went to bed, she slept
the sound sleep of youth.
Septimus, after dismissing the cab, wandered in his vague way over to
the Café de Paris, instinct suggesting his belated breakfast, which, like
his existence, Zora had forgotten. The waiter came.
"Monsieur désire?"
"Absinthe," murmured Septimus absent-mindedly, "and--er--poached
eggs--and anything--a raspberry ice."
The waiter gazed at him in stupefaction; but nothing being too
astounding in Monte Carlo, he wiped the cold perspiration from his
forehead and executed the order.
The unholy meal being over, Septimus drifted into the square and spent
most of the night on a bench gazing at the Hôtel de Paris and
wondering which were her windows. When she mentioned casually, a
day or two later, that her windows looked the other way over the sea,
he felt that Destiny had fooled him once more; but for the time being he
found a gentle happiness in his speculation. Chilled to the bone, at last,
he sought his hotel bedroom and smoked a pipe, meditative, with his
hat on until the morning. Then he went to bed.
Two mornings afterwards Zora came upon him on the Casino terrace.
He sprawled idly on a bench between a fat German and his fat wife,
who were talking across him. His straw hat was tilted over his eyes and
his legs were crossed. In spite of the conversation (and a middle-class
German does not whisper when he talks to his wife), and the going and

coming of the crowd--in spite of the sunshine and the blue air, he
slumbered peacefully. Zora passed him once or twice. Then by the
station lift she paused and looked out at the bay of Mentone clasping
the sea--a blue enamel