dead man’s, only his eyes watched her blackly, like a ghost’s. Again she was confronted with the suffering ghost of the man. And she was a woman, powerless before this suffering ghost which was still in the flesh.
“You don’t think you are wrong, do you?” she asked, in cold distress.
“No! I am not wrong. Only maybe I can’t hold out,” he said.
“And then what?” she said, coldly.
“I shall go my way, alone.” There seemed to be nothing left of him but the black, ghostly eyes that gazed on her. He began to speak Spanish.
“It hurts me in my soul, as if I were dying,” he said.
“But why?” she cried. “You are not ill?”
“I feel as if my soul were coming undone.”
“Then don’t let it,” she cried, in fear and repulsion.
But he only gazed with those fixed, blank eyes. A sudden deep stillness came over her; a sense of power in herself.
“You should forget for a time,” she said gently, compassionately laying her hand on his. What was the good of trying to understand him or wrestle with him? She was a woman. He was a man, and—and—and therefore not quite real. Not true to life.
He roused himself suddenly from her touch, as if he had come awake, and he looked at her with keen, proud eyes. Her motherly touch had roused him like a sting.
“Yes!” he said. “It is true!”
“Of course it is!” she replied. “If you want to be so—so abstract and Quetzalcoatlian, then bury your head sometimes, like an ostrich in