The red light changed to green; he gave a wild spurt to his pedaling, so swift that she had no time to step on the curb, then just as wildly he stopped and asked her the way to the beach in a breathless voice which seemed to miss a beat. The voice matched the eyes as his tan, healthy, smooth skin did not.

The tone in which he asked directions was as if the beach were a shelter to which he was speeding away from grave dangers.

He was no handsomer than the other young men she had seen in the place, but his eyes left a memory and stirred in her a wild rebellion against the place. With bitter irony she remembered ruins she had seen in Guatemala, and an American visitor saying: "I hate ruins, I hate dilapidation, tombs." But this new town at the beach was infinitely more static and more disintegrated than the ancient ruins. The clouds of monotony, uniformity, which hung over the new, neat mansions, the impeccable lawns, the dustless garden furniture. The men and women at the beach, all in one dimension, without any magnetism to bring them together, zombies of civilization, in elegant dress with dead eyes.

Why was she here? Waiting for Alan to end his work, Alan who had promised to come. But the longing for other places kept her awake.

She walked and collided against a sign which read: "This is the site of the most costly church on Long Island."

She walked. At midnight the town was deserted. Everyone was at home with bottles from which they hoped to extract a gaiety bottled elsewhere.

"It's the kind of drinking one does at wakes," thought Sabina, looking into the bars, where limp figures clutched at bottles containing oblivion.

At one o'clock she looked for a drug store to buy sleeping pills. They were closed. She walked. At two o'clock she was worn out but still tormented by a place which refused to have feasts on the street, dances, fireworks, orgies of guitars, marimbas, shouts of delight, tournaments of poetry and courtships.

At three o'clock she swung towards the beach to ask the moon why she had allowed one of her night children to become so lost in a place long ago deprived of human life.

A car stopped beside her, and a very tall, white-haired Irish policeman addressed her courteously.

"Can I give you a lift home?"

"I couldn't sleep," said Sabina. "I was looking for a drug store to buy sleeping pills, or aspirin. They're all closed. I was trying to walk until I felt sleepy..."

"Boy trouble?" he said, his white-haired head very gallantly held with a suave rectitude which did not come from his policeman's training but from some deeper pride in rectitude itself as the image of man's erotic pride.