Vera was more than innocent. She was unconscious of anything particular in her friendship for this friend of her childhood. What could be more natural than that she should love to talk of that one blissful interval in her dull existence--the solitary oasis in the desert of genteel poverty? Only then had she known the beauty of woods and gardens; only then had she known what summer could mean to the emancipated child: the rapture of riding over dancing waves in a cockle-shell of a boat, with the warm wind blowing her hair and the sea-gulls flashing their white wings overhead, the adorable birds whose name was legion. To talk of those young days, and to feel again as she had felt then, was a delight which only Claude could give her; and the more hollow and unsatisfying the things that money could buy became to her, the more she loved to sit with her locked hands upon her knee and talk of that unforgotten holiday. "Do you remember that evening I asked you to row me out to the setting sun, right into the great golden ball, and you said you would, and you went too far, and we were out till after dark, and everybody was first frightened and then angry?" All their talk began with "Do you remember?" His memory was better than hers, and he recalled adventures and moments that she had forgotten. One day he brought her a little sketch on thick cardboard, roughly painted in oils, one of his early bits of impressionism before he had studied art, a little girl in a short white frock, with hair flying about her head, cheeks like roses, and the blue of the sea in her eyes. "What a funny child. You didn't mean that for me?" "For no one else. I have dozens of such daubs. You remember how I used to sit on a rock and paint while you were looking for shells or worrying the jelly-fish." "Poor things. I wanted to see them move. I hope they have no feelings. Yes, you used to sit and paint; and I thought you disagreeable because you would not play with me." Beyond these pictures of the past they had inexhaustible subjects for talk. There was a whole world of literature, the literature of decadence, in which Vera had to be initiated, and Claude was a past master in that particular phase of intellectual life. Baudelaire, Verlaine, Nietzsche, the literature of pessimism, and the literature of despair, that rebellion against law, human and divine, which Shelley began, and which had been a dominant note among young poets since the "Revolt of Islam" filled romantic minds with wonder and a vague delight.