Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat and read the Bible. Green waves died upon each other, like a cohesive fantasy. Each small wave rose as high as the other and ended in a swan’s neck of white interrogation. Sunlight blinded the water as style dazes the contents of a poem and the blue sky lifted itself to symmetrical stupor. The air fell against one like a soothing religion. The bristling melancholia of pine trees lined the wide river. But Alvin Tor sat in his floating row-boat, reading the Bible. He read the Songs of Solomon, and a sensual pantomime made a taut stage of his face. When not reading the Songs of Solomon he was as staidly poised as a monk’s folded arms. He had borrowed the colours of his life from that spectrum of desire which he called God. Different shades of green leaves were, to him, the playful jealousies of a presence; the tossed colours of birds became the ineffably light gestures of a lost poet. His Swedish peasant’s face had singed its dimples in a bit of sophistication but his eyes were undeceived. His heart was a secluded soliloquy transforming the shouts of the world into tinkling surmises. His broad nose and long lips were always at ease and his ruddy skin held the texture of fresh bunting. His eyes knew the unkindled reticence of a rustic boy. This man of one mood sat in his floating row-boat, reading the Bible. He reached the mouth of the river and drifted out to sea. The sea was a menacing lethargy of rhythm: green swells sensed his row-boat with dramatic leisure. A sea gull skimmed over the water, like a haphazard adventure. Looking up from his Bible Alvin Tor saw the body of a woman floating beside his boat. With one jerk his face swerved into blankness. The tip of his tongue met his upper lip as though it were a fading rim of reality. The fingers of one hand distressed his flaxen hair. The woman floated on her back with infinite abandon. Little ripples of green water died fondling her body. The green swells barely lifting her were great rhythms disturbed by an inert discord. Sunlight, fumbling at her body, relinquished its promiscuous desires and became abashed. _Her wet brown hair had a drugged gentility: its short dark curls hugged her head with despondent understanding. Her face had been washed to an imperturbable transparency: it had the whiteness of reclining foam overcast with a twinge of green--the sea had lent her its skin._ Her eyes were limply unworried and violated to gray disintegration. In separated bits of outlines the remains of thinly impudent features were slipping from her face. The bloated pity of black and white garments hid her lean body.