Domini and Androvsky scarcely spoke as they ate. Once she said:
“Do you realise that this is a wedding breakfast?”
She was thinking of the many wedding receptions she had attended in London, of crowds of smartly-dressed women staring enviously at tiaras, and sets of jewels arranged in cases upon tables, of brides and bridegrooms, looking flushed and anxious, standing under canopies of flowers and forcing their tired lips into smiles as they replied to stereotyped congratulations, while detectives—poorly disguised as gentlemen—hovered in the back-ground to see that none of the presents mysteriously disappeared. Her presents were the velvety roses in the earthen vases, the breezes of the desert, the sand humps, the yellow butterflies, the silence that lay around like a blessing pronounced by the God who made the still places where souls can learn to know themselves and their great destiny.
“A wedding breakfast,” Androvsky said.
“Yes. But perhaps you have never been to one.”
“Never.”
“Then you can’t love this one as much as I do.”
“Much more,” he answered.
She looked at him, remembering how often in the past, when she had been feeling intensely, she had it borne in upon her that he was feeling even more intensely than herself. But could that be possible now?
“Do you think,” she said, “that it is possible for you, who have never lived in cities, to love this land as I love it?”