“I don’t know! I don’t know!” He smiled a crumpled sort of smile, and she could tell he really did not know. “In the first time, you can feel the flowers on their stem, the stem very strong and full of sap, no?—and the flower opening on top like a face that has the perfume of desire. And a woman might be like that.—But this passes, and the sun begins to shine very strong, very hot, no? Then everything inside a man changes, goes dark, no! And the flowers crumple up, and the breast of a man becomes like a steel mirror. And he is all darkness inside, coiling and uncoiling like a snake. All the flowers withered up on shrunk stems, no? And then women don’t exist for a man. They disappear like the flowers.”
“And then what does he want?” said Kate.
“I don’t know. Perhaps he wants to be a very big man, and master all the people.”
“Then why doesn’t he?” said Kate.
He lifted his shoulders.
“And you,” he said to her. “You seem to me like that morning I told you about.”
“I am just forty years old,” she laughed shakily.
Again he lifted his shoulders.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It is the same. Your body seems to me like the stem of the flower I told you about, and in your face it will always be morning, of the time of the rains.”
“Why do you say that to me?” she said, as an involuntary strange shudder shook her.