Carey had judged and loved, yet Carey had said he did not believe in a God. Robin wondered if he believed now.
Robin was in Rome, and could not hear the words of a man and a woman who were sitting one night, after the marriage, upon a piazza above the Lake of Como.
The man said:
“Do you remember Robin’s ‘Danseuse de Tunisie’?”
“The woman with the fan?”
“Yes. I see her now without the fan. With it she was a siren, perhaps, but without it she is—”
“What is she without it?”
“Eternal woman. Ah, how much better than the siren!”
There was a silence filled only by the voice of the waterfall between the cypresses. Then the woman spoke, rather softly.
“You taught her what she could be without the fan. You have done the great thing.”