Philip laughed. “Am I to clap my hands at the rain,” he said, “and say, ‘Stop at once! Rosina wearies for the sun’?”
She perched herself on the arm of his chair, a favourite attitude for her supplications. “No, my dear,” she said, “all your money will not do that. Besides, even if the rain obeyed you and the sun shone, there would still be nobody to look at me. But you can do something.”
“And what’s that?”
“Just a little apartment in Naples,” she said. “It is so gay in Naples even if the sirocco blows or if the tramontana bellows. There are the theatres; there are crowds; there is movement. I cannot be active, but there I can see others being active. There are fresh faces in the street, there is gaiety.”
“Oh, I hate towns!” said Philip.
She got up and began to speak more rapidly. “You think only of yourself,” she said. “I mope here; I am miserable. I feel like one of the snails on the wall, crawling, crawling, and going into a dusty crevice. That is not my nature. I hate snails, except when they are cooked, and then I gobble them up, and wipe my mouth and think no more of them. You can read your book in a town just as well as here, and you can take a walk in a town. Ah, do, Philip!”
Suddenly and unexpectedly Philip found himself picturing his days here alone, without Rosina. He did not consciously evoke the image; it presented itself to him from outside himself. The island had certainly cast its spell over him: just to be here, to awake to the sense of its lotus-land tranquillity, and to go to sleep knowing that a fresh eventless day would welcome him, made him content. He could imagine himself now alone in this plain vaulted room, with the storm swirling through the stone-pine outside, and the smell of burning wood on the hearth without desiring Rosina’s presence.
“Well, it might be done,” he said. “We could have a little nook in Naples, if you liked. I don’t say that I should always be there.”
Rosina’s eyes sparkled. “No, no, that would be selfish of me,” she said. “You would come over here for a week when you wished, as you are so fond of your melancholy island....” She stopped, and her Italian suspiciousness came to the surface. “You are not thinking of leaving me?” she asked.
“Of course I am not,” he said impatiently. “You imagine absurdities.”