“But, before that, I want to spend all my feeling, I don't want a thrill left, lost; I want to empty and exhaust myself.” Her emotion was so strong that it drew her away from him, erect, with her bare arms reaching to their fullest quivering length. In the blue gloom of the room shuttered against the white day, with her wrap, the color of lilacs, lightly clasping her shoulders, she seemed to be a vision in subdued paint. Lee was held motionless, outside, by the fervor of an appeal to fate rather than to him. She was, the thought recurred to him, too slender, fragile, to contain such a passion. Then, in a transition so sudden that it bewildered him, her mouth was against his, her hands straining him to her. She was ugly then, her face was unrecognizable in an expression of paralysed fury. The heat, Lee protested, grew worse with evening; not a stir of air brought out the dry scraping rustle of the palms, a sound like the friction of thin metal plates. The balcony, if possible, was worse than their room. In his irritation Lee cursed the scruples of his brother; Savina, prostrate on the bed, said nothing. At intervals her hand moved, waving a paper fan with a printed idyl from Boucher, given her in a café at Havana. She had none of the constrained modesty, the sense of discomfort at her own person, so dominating in Fanny. Lee finally lighted a lamp: the hours, until the precipitant onrush of night, seemed stationary; gigantic moths fluttered audibly about the illumination and along the dim ceiling. When, later, he was on the bed, it was wet under his sweating body. In a passing sleep Savina gave one of the cries of her waking emotion. In a state of unconsciousness her fingers reached toward him. From the balcony beyond them drifted a woman's challenging laughter--one of the travelling beauties Daniel had mentioned--and he could hear the bursts of discordant sound on the street of Cobra, the combined efforts of rival bands hideous singly and together beyond description. What a hell of a night, what a night in hell! The moths, defrauded in their hunger for light, blundered softly around the walls; when Lee rose to light a cigarette they would, he felt, gather at the match and beat it out with their desirous wings. Then he heard a shot, and uplifted clamoring voices; all as unreal, as withdrawn, as a simulated murder on a distant stage. He pictured the flaring restaurants, the banks with corrugated iron locked across their fronts; the faces of the negroes brought black and lurid out of the surrounding blackness. Savina, awake, demanded a drink, and he held a clay water monkey awkwardly to her lips. The faint double blast of a steam signal rose at the back of the hotel, beyond the town; he had heard it before and now connected it with Daniel's sugar mill.