His eyes followed her gaze. Over their heads the wind had piled up a great palace of white clouds; under the rifted floors the blue sky ran shallow in a faint milky turquoise, while above, between, beyond those aerial roofs and pinnacles and domes it deepened to lapis lazuli, luminous, transparent, light behind color and color behind light. The green earth looked greener under the low-lying shafts of blue and silver; far off, on the sea, the shadows of the clouds lay like the stain of spilt red wine.
"Who was the great man?" she asked with apparent irrelevance, "who said that women were incapable of a disinterested passion for nature?"
He knitted his brows. Frida had proved a little disconcerting at times. He had had to begin all over again with her, aware that, though ostensibly renewing their old acquaintance, he was actually making a new one, to which faint recognitions and perishing reminiscences gave a bewildering, elusive charm. But Frida remembered many things that he had forgotten, and a certain directness and familiarity born of this superior memory of hers puzzled him and put him out. This time, however, he had a dreamy recollection.
"Fancy your remembering that!"
"I remember everything. At any rate, I remember quite enough to see that you're just the same; you haven't changed a little bit. Except that you don't look as you did the first night I met you."
"And how did I look then?"
She paused, carefully selecting her phrase. "You looked—as if—I'd given you a shock. You had expected something different. That dream did not tally with the reality."
"How on earth——"
"How on earth did I know? You may not be aware of it, but you have a very expressive face."
"I was not aware of it."