how he came back with her to the thirteenth-century palace beside the Arno where she lodged. She had a little room with a painted ceiling, and the infant Bacchus and adoring nymphs disporting themselves in bas-relief on the mantelpiece, a room looking over the brown fluted roofs of Florence; but the great loggia where he and she sat faced the Arno, and they had coffee and cigarettes and watched the swift blue night fall over Florence while the swarm of lights waked broken reflections in the swirling water. On the loggia they exchanged a brief mention of their troubles, both commonplace enough; hers a childhood with parents who perpetually quarrelled, the mother a hard worldly woman who eventually took to drugs, and a father who had at last left for another woman the home which was so unbearable; while Sophia herself had only shaken off the horrors of it and earned her own living, barely enough at that, a few months earlier. Richard's trouble was his wife, who seemed not unlike Sophia's mother. He was both too kindly and too weak--for his was one of those temperaments that shrink from any display of unpleasantness--to have mastered her brutally and for good--and strong enough to go on living in the same house with her because, although she made his life a weariness, she was an intensely conventional woman to whom the position of a wife separated from her husband before all the world would have been intolerable. Between him and Sophia the fact that they both knew the terror of not being able to slip out even to post a letter without dreading what they might find on going back, made a bond of sympathy. Sophia, ignorant as she was, could not be a young, and, for some people, a beautiful woman, without having learned a few stray scraps of wisdom, and one was that when a man began to confide his troubles to her it was as well to see less of him. But Sophia let herself drift, because she liked being with the man so much; and also the fact that he was from her own place, that the relentless gods had brought him to Florence to meet her, and would, in due course, send them both back to where, henceforth, they would know each other, gave her a curious feeling of being entrapped in some web too powerful to break. She never blamed him or let him blame himself for what inevitably happened. "Sophia, my sweet," he wrote her in one of the letters she now picked up at random. "I didn't deliberately set to work to make love to you. I knew your beauty inflamed me and your wit delighted me. But when we first met I thought we should just see each other a few times and quarrel and laugh, and I should revel in your looks and no harm done. And now little Miss Jervis has turned into Sophia, and either I must have Sophia for ever and ever mine, or I ought to have stuck to an elderly uncle line and come away with no tears for her and no self-loathing for me, and no need to lie and shuffle and make her share in the lies and shuffles for the future."