Incomprehensibly the fluctuating clamor--he could distinguish low pitched drums--brought him the vision, pale and remote and mysteriously smiling, of Cytherea. He thought of that torrential discord rising around her belled purple skirt, the cool yellow of her waist crossed with fragile lace, beating past her lifted slender hand, the nails stained with vermilion, to the pointed oval of her face against the black hair and streaming gold of the headdress. Nothing, it appeared, could be farther apart than the muffled furious strains escaping in bursts through the opened windows beyond and the still apparition from the tranquility of his Eastlake house. He would have said, unhesitatingly, that the formal melody of the eighteenth century, of Scarlatti and harpsichords, was the music that best accompanied Cytherea. But she dominated, haunted with her grace, the infernal dinning sound of unspeakable defilements. Savina was racked beyond endurance: “I can't stand it any longer,” she told Lee hysterically, risen with her palms pressed to her ears. “I can hear it with every nerve. It will never go out of my brain. You must stop it. Can't you understand that it is driving me mad!” Her voice grew so shrill, she trembled so violently, that he had to hold her forcibly in his arms. When, toward dawn, it ceased, Savina was exhausted; she lay limp and white on her bed; and, across the room, he could hear the shallowness of her irregular breathing. As a grey light diluted the darkness, the trade wind, the night wind, dropped, and the heat palpably increased. Instantaneously the sun-flooded morning was born, a morning that lost its freshness, its pearly iridescence, immediately. He closed the slats of the balcony doors: Savina at last was sleeping, with her countenance, utterly spent, turned to him. The sharp cries of the newsboys, the street vendors, were drowned in the full sweep of a traffic moving to the blasts of multitudinous horns. When she woke, past ten, drinking the small cup of black coffee which locally accompanied dressing, she was still shaken. “That's the most cursed racket anyone ever had to endure!” A growing irritation made harsh his voice. “You couldn't torment a worse sound out of a thousand cats.” She smiled wanly. “If we were like that in the past,” he added, “I'm glad we changed, even if we are worse in other ways.” “I could hear myself screaming and screaming,” Savina said. In the heated room she had an uncontrollable chill. “Lee, I can't bring myself to tell you: something black and dreadful ... had me. There was no one else. It was like a woods. The hands ripping at me--” With her face buried in her embroidered pillow, half clothed in web-like garments threaded with black ribbons, she cowered in an abject and pitiful agony.