"Only to show you how completely I have left it behind."
Julia's eyes were fixed upon the limitless sands, a sea where a faint line lost itself in the red west and the horizon shut from her sight everything that she believed to be her life.
"This is the seventh day, Thérèse!"
"Already you are as brown as an Arab, Julia!"
"You as well, ma chère amie!"
"Robert does not like dark women," said the Comtesse de la Maine, and rubbed her cheek. "I must wear two veils."
"Look, Thérèse!"
Across the face of the desert the glow began to withdraw its curtain. The sands suffused an ineffable hue, a shell-like pink took possession, and the desert melted and then grew colder—it waned before their eyes, withered like a tea-rose.
"Like a rose!" Julia murmured, "smell its perfume!" She lifted her head, drinking in with delight the fragrance of the sands.
"Ma chère Julia," gently protested the comtesse, lifting her head, "perfume, Julia!" But she breathed with her friend, while a sweetly subtle, intoxicating odor, as of millions and millions of roses, gathered, warmed, kept, then scattered on the airs of heaven, intoxicating her.