He became aware of all his fragilities at once, his dependence, his need. Nearer she came, her face growing larger as she bent over him, her eyes brighter and warmer, nearer and nearer, melting his hostilities.

It was terribly sweet to be so naked in her presence. As in all the tropical climates of love, his skin softened, his hair felt silkier on his skin, his nerves untangled from their sharp wiry contortions. All the tensions of pretenses ceased. He felt himself growing smaller, back to his natural size, as in tales of magic, shrinking painlessly in order to enter this refuge of her heart, relinquishing the straining for maturity. But with this came all the corresponding moods of childhood: the agonized helplessness, the early defenselessness, the anguish at being at others' complete mercy.

It was necessary to arrest this invasion of her warmth which drugged his will, his uprightness in anger, to arrest this dissolution and flowing of one being into another which had already taken place once between his mother and then been violently shattered with the greatest shock and pain by her fickleness and frivolities. It was necessary to destroy this fluid warmth in which he felt himself absorbed, drowning as within the sea itself, her body a chalice, a ciborium, a niche of shadows. Her gray cotton dress folded like an accordion around her feet, with the gold dust of secrecy between each rivulet of tissue, a journey of infinite detours in which his manhood would be trapped, captured.

He dropped her naked foot and rose stiffly. He took up where he had left off, took up the adolescent charades. His gentleness turned to limpness, the hand he extended to take the cape off her shoulders was as if severed from the rest of his body.

He took up following her, carrying her cape. He incensed her with words, he sat in the closest proximity, in her shadow, always near enough to bask in the warmth emanating from her body, always within reach of her hand, always with his shirt open at the throat in an oblique challenge to her hands, but the mouth in flight. Wearing around his waist the most unique belts so that her eyes would admire his waist, but the body in flight.

This design in space was a continuation of John's way of caressing her, the echo of his teasings. The tantalizing night spent in seeking the sources of pleasure but avoiding all possible dangers of welding their bodies into any semblance of marriage. It aroused in Sabina a similar suspense, all the erotic nerves awakened, throwing off futile, wasted sparks in space.

She saw his charades as a child's jealous imitations of a maturity he could not reach.

"You're sad, Sabina," he said. "Come with me. I have things to show you." As if rising with her in his gyroscope of fantasy he took her to visit his collection of empty cages.