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a curious indifference that he read it, sitting in an olive-grove in Poros. A casual friend from Paris whom he encountered in Beirut told him that Alice was going to marry Campion—or said she was. Old Madame Dubois, whose trail he crossed as she was on her way to winter in Egypt, told him that Campion would never marry anyone and asked politely whether he was happy. Sitting on the terrace of the Café Moka, he admitted that he was very happy. “You have become a Mediterranean man, eh?” said the old lady, with her distinguished face concentrated upon his like a burning-glass in the shadow of that absurd straw hat. “It happens to people sometimes, you know.” Baird tried to tell her something of his recent journeys, but found them completely lacking in the kind of detail which could make small-talk. No, he had not looked up the Adlers in Jerusalem, nor the Habib family in Beirut. He had, in fact, done none of the things he had been advised to do. He had presented not a single letter of introduction. He had been drifting vaguely about, he told her, becoming a sub-tropical man by degrees. The old lady sucked her iced coffee through a straw, watching his face closely all the time. There was just a tinge of mockery in her eyes. “You’ve got broader and older-looking,” she said at last, removing the small creamy moustache she had allowed to form upon her upper lip with a lace handkerchief. “No doubt you are beginning to enjoy love-making too, without all your silly Anglo-Saxon sentiment?” He had indeed become broader and older-looking; it was partly due to the moustache. But he searched for some way to make the change more concrete so that it could be expressed in words. What could one say? The fundamental factor could, it seemed, only be expressed in negatives, like the first principle of the Hindu religions. “Nothing means very much any more,” he said, and added anxiously, lest the phrase should bear a false interpretation. “I mean by that I am quite happy and full of life; but I don’t try to feel through books any more. I can’t.” She smiled with her beautiful young-girl face, and laid a small tender hand on his wrist. “The world is so large,” she said, “and a lifetime so short, and people so lovable and cruel and exciting.”
    It was indeed large, he thought, letting his mind slip back across the kaleidoscope of the last few years, from the courtyard of the fortune-teller in Fez to the day spent under the fig-tree in Poros: from a face reflected in a Damascus water-jar to a cafe in Horns.
    â€œI think that it is only in the south that they warm themselves at life instead of transforming it into bad literature,” said the old lady. Baird lit a cigarette.
    He said: “I’ve begun a novel inside. It should take five years to experience and a year to write. It will be my only justification for taking such a long holiday from myself.” He was surprised to see from this that he did consider himself (his English self) as someone quite separate, and his present life not simply an extension of the past—that peach-fed existence of parties and pretensions.
    Madame Dubois settled her hands more deeply in her gloves.
    â€œLet me tell you why I come to Egypt every year,” she said, with the faintest suspicion of archness. “Fifteen years ago, in spring (she said the word with that little upcast inflexion of pleasure, as Parisians do) I fell in love. I was already married. I was in the temple at Baalbec and I met a young Greek officer. He was also married. We determined that though experience was to be respected—and ours was that spontaneous unfolding inevitable sequence of meetings which one covers with the inadequate word I have just used for the experience of love; while that had to be respected, the common forms of life too had their due. He had two children. I had a husband so gracious and human that I could