“This detestable climate! It brutalises us. It makes one understand why the English drink beer, and love to see the red corpses of animals hung up in shops. A gross climate, and a gross people.”
Eve had wrapped the purple scarf round her feet.
“If we could be sure of a little sunshine every other day!”
She was staring at the fire, and Massinger was studying her with an interested intentness. Thought and desire were mingled at the back of his pale eyes.
“Sunshine—clear, yellow light! Don’t you yearn for it?”
“Who does not? With the exception of the people who have been baked in the tropics.”
“And it is so near. The people who are free can always find it.”
He lay back against the cushions on the lounge, his eyes still on her, and shining with an incipient smile.
“You leave the grey country at dusk, and travel through the night, and then the dawn comes up, all orange and gold, and the cypresses hold up their beckoning fingers. There the sea is blue, and there are flowers, roses, carnations, wallflowers, stocks, and mimosa; oranges and lemons hang on the trees, and the white villas shine among palms and olives.”
His voice became insinuating, and took on its sing-song blank-verse cadence.