A shameless and scandalous curiosity seized him to share in that colloquy. The various paraphernalia of the shop, the piled-up tins of Reading Biscuits, the great copper canisters of Indian teas, the noble erections of Blacksod cheeses⁠—all melted⁠—all grew vague and indistinct.

“Mounted astride of a girt tombstone,” he repeated to himself; and the thought of the cool whiteness of that girl’s skin and its contact with that chiselled marble reduced everything else in the world to a kind of irrelevance, to something that fell into the category of the tedious and the negligible.