“Help me to bring you to yourself. You are stunned. Ill things come over you and you are stunned, you cannot make yourself clean.... I want you naked. Help me. Naked against me naked. You will be at last yourself ... inviolate. Help me!” He undressed her. She helped him to undress her. She lay in his arms: lost sweetly like a tree in a warm wind. * * * * * “You make me feel that I have roots,” she told him. She found that she had been buried in a corrodent silence. She was lifted forth. She had words. “You are strong,” he said, “and you have been a fool.” Holding her in his arms, he was to her a sunrise ... cool ... cutting mists and a dim sleep. She lay in him like a warm creature in a gentle sun, sucking sun ... all open. * * * * * “Soon I must go ... back to Washington ... my home.” “You have a home?” “Why do you doubt it?” “You are so strong away from home.” “You are a glory, Frances Luve. You are a spirit like a tree, standing alone on a single rock in a marshland.” “That is what you think of my people?” “That is what I think of your people.” “But have you a home?” “The Western World,” he smiled with a fine bitterness that hurt her. “I am a Jew, you know.” “Yes ... I know,” she hushed. “The first Jew you have ever known?” “The first....” “Do you know me, Fanny?” “Will I ever know?... You are going away.” “That is right, also.” “Yes.” She looked at him. She sat high above his prone strong body; looked at him. “Yes, it is right. I look at you. You are beautiful. You are clean. You are wilful and straight. You have black curling hair like a savage dance all over the white tenderness of your body. You have eyes that look forever. Yet I do not love you. I love my husband. He is weak and dirty. Until you came I said: ‘He is weak and dirty, I hate him.’ You came with your clear strength. You took me naked. I took you naked. Because I have taken you clean and strong I know that it is he whom I love.” He held her hand. “There is God,” he said, “May he bless you.” “What does that mean ... if He blesses?” “The Jews in three thousand bloody years have not found out.” “I tell you I do not love you: I tell you and you bless me.” “I reverence you, Fanny. You are clear like water. Love is a word I have not won the use of.” “What have you done to me!” “You are water, Frances. You were muddied and thick. You can look down, now, through the clearness of yourself, to the dirt base of yourself....” “ ...to Harry!” “See him clear, through your own clean-ness.”