When I reached my rooms, Mrs. Mahon was there with my breakfast tray, and wondering what could have taken me out so early. Mrs. Mahon was the Italian widow of an Irish policeman. I sat down to my fruit, and her ample and unsubtle beauty was pleasant to my mood, so that I held her with words. Mrs. Mahon loved to talk with me: but in her sense of my state she was shrewd, and she had never intruded her wide hard rondures and the brash clarities of her mind upon my silence. She stood over me now, with her bare arms crowding her bosom, and told me of the latest misdeeds of her lover. Mrs. Mahon was beautiful, and to me entirely without charms. Her head was small, the black hair massed low on the blandness of the forehead, and her nose was Roman. Her eyes bore out my fancy of the moment, that she was not flesh; for in their heavy facets was no expression. The mouth was long and quiet. Its sensuality seemed a deliberate trait, somehow not born of her own flesh but of the will of the artist who had made her. Finally, her body as I could sense it under the loose white fabric of her gown, was an arrangement of obvious feminine forms: high breasts, stomach and hips subdued: and yet to me devoid of the mystery of her sex. She was the body unlit, goodly and functioning: the sacrament of flesh without the spirit. So this day it was cool nourishment to look at Mrs. Mahon, to drink in her clarities, to convince myself that she was not sculpture, quite the opposite: _real_. The tang of the grapefruit, the earthy pungence of the not too fresh eggs, the bite of the coffee, merged with Mrs. Mahon: and I was happy in a deep forgetfulness. I was sleepy. The thought came:--You have had a bad dream. Your visit to the body may be real: but you can wipe it out like a dream. It need have no consequence in the real world. And that is the trait of the dream, is it not? the one trait that shuts dream out from other planes of life? And I chatted with Mrs. Mahon, and gave her advice. “His misdeeds,” I said, “save you from ever being bored by him. You should be thankful.” She smiled: “Oh, I guess he’s a man: and I guess I’m a woman. I suppose I get him sore, too, sometimes, just because my ways are them of a woman. And yet, if I wasn’t a woman, and if he wasn’t a man----” “Precisely, Mrs. Mahon. What you’ve just said is philosophical and deep.” She shook her head at my solemn words which, I judged, tickled her as the prickings of a poignard might titillate an elephant. She went out with my tray, and the thought “Rome” came to me as I watched her perfect carriage: the low spacing of her feet, the swing of her hips, the breadth of her back, and the little head so rightfully proportioned, like a rudder steering the life that dwelt within her body. --Rome. How far I am from Rome. How sweet Rome would be, with its sure shallow strength.