II. She went out an hour later, her thoughts waltzing and eddying like the sunlit dust which the wind kept whirling round the corners in spasmodic gusts. Everything in her mind was hot and cold, and beating and blowing about, like the weather on that dancing draughty day; the very pavement of the familiar streets, and the angles of the buildings, seemed to be spinning with the rest, as if the heaviest substances had suddenly grown imponderable. “It must,” she thought, “be a little like the way the gravestones will behave on the Day of Judgment.” To make sure of where she was she had to turn down one of the white streets leading to the sea, and fix her eyes on that wedge of blue between the houses, as if it were the only ballast to her brain, the only substantial thing left. “I’m glad it’s one of the days when the sea is firm,” she thought. The glittering expanse, flattened by the gale and solidified by the light, rose up to meet her as she walked toward it, the pavement lifting her and flying under her like wings till it dropped her down in the glare of the Promenade, where the top-knots of the struggling palms swam on the wind like chained and long-finned sea-things against that sapphire wall climbing half-way up the sky. She sat down on a bench, clinging sideways as if lashed to a boat’s deck, and continued to steady her eyes on the Mediterranean. To collect her thoughts she tried to imagine that nothing had happened, that neither of the two cables had come, and that she was preparing to lead her usual life, as mapped out in the miniature engagement-book in her hand-bag. She had her “set” now in the big Riviera town where she had taken refuge in 1916, after the final break with Chris, and where, after two years of war-work and a “Reconnaissance Française” medal, she could carry her head fairly high, and even condescend a little to certain newcomers.