On her way back to the barge she bought new candles, and a fur rug to lie on, because Rango believed it was too bourgeois to sleep on a bed like everybody else. They slept on the floor. Perhaps a fur, the bed of Eskimos, would be appropriate.

When Rango came, he looked at the candles and the fur like a lion looking at a lettuce leaf. But lying on it, his bronze desire is aroused and the primitive bed is baptized in memory of cavernous dwellings.

At this hour children are reading fairy tales from which Rango and Djuna were led to expect such marvels, the impossible. Rango had imagined a life without work, without responsibilities. Djuna had wanted a life of desire and freedom, not comfort but the smoothness of magical happenings, not luxury but beauty, not security but fulfillment, not perfection but a perfect moment like this one...but without Zora waiting to lie between them like an incubus...

Djuna was unprepared for Rango's making the first leap out of the trap. It came unexpectedly at midnight as they were about to separate. Out of the fog of enswathing caresses came his voice: "We're leading a selfish life. There are many things happening in the world; we should be working for them. You are like all the artists, with your big floodlights fixed on the sky, and never on earth, where things are happening. There is a revolution going on, and I want to help."

Djuna did not think of the world or the revolution needing Rango, Rango and his bohemian indiscipline, his love of red wine, his laziness. She felt that Zora's persecutions were driving him away. He was caught between a woman who wanted to die, and one who wanted to live! He had hoped to amalgamate the women, so he would not feel the tension between his two selves. He had thought only of his own emotional comfort. He had overlooked Zora's egoistic ferocity, and Djuna's clairvoyance. The alliance was a failure.

Now he was driven to risk his life for some impersonal task.

She was silent. She looked at his face and saw that his mouth looked unhappy, wounded, and revealed his desperateness. He kept it tightly shut, as women do when they don't want to weep. His mouth which was not in keeping with his lion's head, which was the mouth of a child, small and vulnerable; the mouth which aroused her indulgence.

Parting at the corner of the street, they kissed desperately as if for a long voyage. A beggar started to play on his violin, then stopped, thinking they were lovers who would never see each other again.

The blood beat in her ears as she walked away, her body parting from Rango in anticipation, hair parting from hair, hands unlocking, lips closing against the last kiss, surrendering him to a more demanding mistress: the revolution.