I was wrong, I suppose. I ought to have put him in irons and shipped him off next day. But I don't know, really I don't know. He took the risks any way. We bought her out, it cost twenty rupees. I got them a little house down the coast on the sea shore, a little house surrounded by palm trees. The sea droned away sleepily right under the verandah. It was to be an idyl of the East; he was to live there for ever with her and write novels on the verandah. And, by God, he was happy--at first. I used to go down there and stay with them pretty often. He taught her English and she taught him Sinhalese. He started to write a novel about the East: it would have been a good novel I think, full of strength and happiness and sun and reality--if it had been finished. But it never was. He began to see the truth, the damned hard unpleasant truths that I had told him that night in the Colombo bungalow. And the cruelty of it was that he still had that rare power to feel, that he still felt. It was the real thing, you see, and the real thing is---didn't I say--immense, steady, enduring. It is; I believe that still. He was in love, but he knew now what she was like. He couldn't speak to her and she couldn't speak to him, she couldn't understand him. He was a civilized cultivated intelligent nervous little man and she--she was an animal, dumb and stupid and beautiful. I watched it happening, I had foretold it, but I cursed myself for not having stopped it, scores of times. He loved her but she tortured him. People would say, I suppose, that she got on his nerves. It's a good enough description. But the cruellest thing of all was that she had grown to love him, love him like an animal; as a bitch loves her master. Jessop stopped. We waited for him to go on but he didn't. The leaves rustled gently in the breeze; the river murmured softly below us; up in the woods I heard a nightingale singing. "Well, and then?" Alderton asked at last in a rather peevish voice. "And then? Damn that nightingale!" said Jessop. I wish I hadn't begun this story. It happened so long ago: I thought I had forgotten to feel it, to feel that I was responsible for what happened then. There's another sort of love; it isn't the body and it isn't the flame; it's the love of dogs and women, at any rate of those slow, big-eyed women of the East. It's the love of a slave, the patient, consuming love for a master, for his kicks and his caresses, for his kisses and his blows. That was the sort of love which grew up slowly in Celestinahami for Reynolds. But it wasn't what he wanted, it was that, I expect, more than anything which got on his nerves. She used to follow him about the bungalow like a dog. He wanted to talk to her about his novel and she only understood how to pound and cook rice. It exasperated him, made him unkind, cruel. And when he looked into her patient, mysterious eyes he saw behind them what he had fallen in love with, what he knew didn't exist. It began to drive him mad.