He drifted away again, before he well knew that he had drifted. Not to the train this time—his memories were illimitably various. (The time had been when he could not trust himself to dip into them, those memories that were now perpetually his refuge, his solace, and his pain.) An hotel bedroom. What hotel?—it didn’t matter. All hotel bedrooms were alike; all Paradise, so long as they had contained _her_. In what spot?—that didn’t matter, either; somewhere warm and gaudy; all their escapades had been in southern places. Somewhere with bougainvillæa ramping over creamy houses, somewhere with gay irresponsible negroes selling oranges out of immense baskets at the street corners. She had never tired of the gash of their white teeth in their black faces as they grinned. She would stop to buy their oranges just to get the grin. And some of them could juggle with oranges, which made her laugh and turn to him in delight and clap her hands. He clenched his fingers together, out of sight, as he lounged in the depths of his arm-chair. That hotel bedroom! Her clothes.... He used to kneel on the floor beside her open dressing-case, lifting out her clothes for her, because she was too lazy to unpack for herself. She watched him through her eye-lashes, amused at his complaints which so ill concealed his joy in her possessions; then she would catch his head and strain it hungrily against her. They were always violent, irresistible, surprising, those rare demonstrations of hers, and left him dizzy and abashed. That hotel bedroom! Always the same furniture; the iron bedstead under the draped mosquito curtains that were so oddly bridal; the combined wash-stand and chest of drawers (the drawers incorrigibly half-open and spilling the disorder of her garments, her ribbons, and her laces), the hanging wardrobe with the long looking-glass door, the dressing-table littered with her brushes, her powder, and her scent bottles. The evenings—he would come noiselessly into her room while she lingered at her mirror, in her long silk nightgown, her gleaming arms lifted to take the pins out of her hair; and after standing in the doorway to watch her, he would switch off the electric light, so that the open window and the dark blue sky suddenly leapt up, deep, luminous, and spangled with gold stars behind her. Then the coo of her voice, never startled, never hasty: a coo of laughter and remonstrance, rather than of displeasure; and he would go to her and draw her out on to the balcony, from where, his arm flung round her shoulders and her suppleness yielding contentedly to his pressure, they watched the yellow moon mount up above the sheaves of the palm-trees, and glint upon a shield of distant water.