This was for Freya the true Greece imagined by the poets, not the island of burned-out rocks denuded of vegetation that she had seen and heard spoken of in her excursions through the Hellenic archipelago.
"To live here the rest of my life!" she murmured with misty eyes. "To die here, forgotten, alone, happy!…"
Ferragut also would like to die in Naples … but with her!… And his quick and exuberant imagination described the delights of life for the two,—a life of love and mystery in some one of the little villas, with a garden peeping out over the sea on the slopes of Posilipo.
The dancers had passed down to the lower terrace where the crowd was greater. New customers were entering, almost all in pairs, as the day was fading. The waiter had ushered some highly-painted women with enormous hats, followed by some young men, into the locked dining-room. Through the half-open door came the noise of pursuit, collision and rebound with brutal roars of laughter.
Freya turned her back, as if the memory of her passage through that den offended her.
The old waiter now devoted himself to them, beginning to serve dinner. To the bottle of Vesuvian wine had succeeded another kind, gradually losing its contents.
The two ate little but felt a nervous thirst which made them frequently reach out their hands toward the glass. The wine was depressing to Freya. The sweetness of the twilight seemed to make it ferment, giving it the acrid perfume of sad memories.
The sailor felt arising within him the aggressive fever of temperate men when becoming intoxicated. Had he been with a man he would have started a violent discussion on any pretext whatever. He did not relish the oysters, the sailor's soup, the lobster, everything that another time, eaten alone or with a passing friend in the same site, would have appeared to him as delicacies.
He was looking at Freya with enigmatical eyes while, in his thought, wrath was beginning to bubble. He almost hated her on recalling the arrogance with which she had treated him, fleeing from that room. "Hypocrite!…" She was just amusing herself with him. She was a playful and ferocious cat prolonging the death-agony of the mouse caught in her claws. In his brain a brutal voice was saying, as though counseling a murder: "This will be her last day!… I'll finish her to-day!… No more after to-day!…" After several repetitions, he was disposed to the greatest violence in order to extricate himself from a situation which he thought ridiculous.
And she, ignorant of her companion's thought, deceived by the impassiveness of his countenance, continued chatting with her glance fixed on the horizon, talking in an undertone as though she were recounting to herself her illusions.