There was no moon; only stars in a dark blue firmament. Black and flat against the sky, the Herculeses and the bowed Atlases, the kilted Dianas and the Venuses who concealed their charms with a two-handed gesture of alluring modesty, stood, like as many petrified dancers, on the piers of the balustrade. The stars looked between them. Below, in the blackness of the plain, burned constellations of yellow lights. Unremittingly, the croaking of frogs came up, thin, remote, but very clear, from invisible waters. “Nights like this,” said Mrs. Aldwinkle, halting and addressing herself with intensity to Calamy, “make one understand the passion of the South.” She had an alarming habit, when she spoke to any one at all intimately or seriously, of approaching her face very close to that of her interlocutor, opening her eyes to their fullest extent and staring for a moment with the fixed penetrating stare of an oculist examining his patient. Like trucks at the tail of a suddenly braked locomotive, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s guests came joltingly to a stop when she stopped. Calamy nodded. “Quite,” he said, “quite.” Even in this faint starlight, he noticed, Mrs. Aldwinkle’s eyes glittered alarmingly as she approached her face to his. “In this horrible bourgeois age”—Mrs. Aldwinkle’s vocabulary (like Mr. Falx’s, though for different reasons) contained no word of bitterer disparagement than “bourgeois”—“it’s only Southern people who still understand or even, I believe, feel passion.” Mrs. Aldwinkle believed in passion, passionately. From behind the glowing red end of his cigar Mr. Cardan began to speak. In the darkness his voice sounded more than ever ripe and fruity. “You’re quite right,” he assured Mrs. Aldwinkle, “quite right. It’s the climate, of course. The warmth has a double effect on the inhabitants, direct and indirect. The direct effect needs no explaining; warmth calls to warmth. It’s obvious. But the indirect is fully as important. In a hot country one doesn’t care to work too hard. One works enough to keep oneself alive (and it’s tolerably easy to keep alive under these stars), and one cultivates long leisures. Now it’s sufficiently obvious that practically the only thing that anybody who is not a philosopher can do in his leisure is to make love. No serious-minded, hard-working man has the time, the spare energy or the inclination to abandon himself to passion. Passion can only flourish among the well-fed unemployed. Consequently, except among women and men of the leisured class, passion in all its luxuriant intricacy hardly exists in the hard-working North. It is only among those whose desires and whose native idleness are fostered by the cherishing Southern heat that it has flourished and continues to flourish, as you rightly point out, my dear Lilian, even in this burgess age.” Mr. Cardan had hardly begun to speak before Mrs. Aldwinkle indignantly moved on again. He outraged all her feelings.