Quietude, a curious sort of emptiness, seemed to descend upon them during those first days in the villa. Even Charmian felt rather "flat." She was conscious of the romance of their situation in this old Arab house, looking out over trees to the bright-blue sea. But when she had carefully arranged and rearranged the furniture, settled on the places for the books, put flowers in the vases, and had several talks with Jeanne, she was acutely aware of a certain vagueness, a certain almost overpowering oddity. She felt rather like a person who has done in a great hurry something she did not really want to do, and who understands her true feeling abruptly. In the course of years she had become so accustomed to the routine of a full life, a life charged with incessant variety of interests, occupations, amusements, a life offering day after day "something to look forward to," and teeming with people whom she knew, that she now confronted weeks, months even, of solitude with Claude almost in fear. He had his work. She had never been a worker in what she considered the real sense, that is a creator striving to "arrive." She conceived of such work as filling the worker's whole life. She knew it must be so, for she had read many lives of great men. Claude, therefore, had his life in Mustapha filled up to the brim for him. But what was she going to do? Claude, on his part, was striving to recapture in Africa the desire for popularity, the longing for fame, the wish to give people what they wanted of him in art, which he had sometimes felt of late in London. But now there were about him no people who knew anything of his art or of him. The cries of cultivated London had faded out of his ears. In Africa he felt strongly the smallness of that world, the insignificance of every little world. His true and indifferent self seemed to gather strength. He fought it. He felt that it would be a foe to the contemplated opera. He wished Alston Lake were with them, or someone who would "wake him up." Charmian, in her present condition, lacked the force which he had often felt in London, a force which had often secretly irritated and troubled him, but which had not been without tonic properties.