Days and nights went by under the trees. The travellers went down into the Yosemite Valley itself. At one hour the subtle shape of Half Dome was suggested through a robe of morning mists, at another it was hewn starkly out of a hard sky. They confronted the incredible grained and golden face of El Capitan, that perfect half of an unknown whole, that perpendicular desert of stone which bares its naked heart to the sun and whose boundaries march with those of the clouds. There was for days a sound of falling waters always. Edward did not hear it, but he could see the thin silken bands of water binding the mountains, and he could lie at the feet of falls in an explosion of light spray and watch the stars shoot out of the smooth high brim of the fall three thousand feet above him. The red pine ground was their bed between the crimson and golden trunks of trees. There was always light on the river and often, it seemed, a light within the river, a twisting snake of light. Yosemite was printed like a dream upon that part of the memory that registers impossible things.... They were motoring westward again through the gold country—Eldorado. The two Fords were together now, Tam driving the first. Lucy was in the front seat beside Tam. Emily and Edward sat in the back. “I have never really driven a car before this trip,” said Tam as they started. “In England I am no motorist, though a friend’s Rolls Royce occasionally wears Lucy and me as buttons. But I am no driver and it alarms me to have anyone but Lucy in the seat beside me.” Lucy looked at the country with a patient expression. The angle of her head followed the line of the hills. The line was like a feverish temperature chart against the sky and Lucy watched it with uncritical attention. Emily put her hand upon Edward’s thin arm. “You know, Edward,” she said, “you’re a masochist.” “I suppose I am,” said Edward despondently. “What is it?” “A person who enjoys hurting himself.” Edward considered this. “That’s what makes me want to love you without being loved,” he thought. “Yes, I want that. I want to be hurt and to make myself sick with pitying myself. I want to ensure that you shouldn’t love me by telling you the worst about myself.” He found it suddenly a real effort to be silent. He wanted to tell her how unhappy he was; he wanted to try and make her cry for him, or rather to satisfy himself that she would never cry for him. He wanted to tell her how often his head hurt and how poorly his ears served him and of the unbearable thundering and crashing that was always in the foreground of his hearing. He wanted to tell her how impossible he found it not to drink too much, how impossible he found it to be like other men. He wanted her to say, “Poor Edward, poor man...” and stroke his hand. He said, “Emily, are you really as hardhearted as Tam says?”