A dance was going on, on the leveled portion of the rock beside the hotel. The music was intermittent, for the wind carried some of the notes away, and the sound of the sea absorbed others, so that these fragments of mambos had an abstract distinction like the music of Erik Satie. It also made the couples seem to be dancing sometimes in obedience to it, and sometimes in obedience to the gravitations of their secret attractions.

A barefoot boy carried Lillian's bags along winding paths. Flowers brushed her face as she passed. Both music and sea sounds grew fainter as they climbed. Cottages were set capriciously on rock ledges, hidden by reeds, or camouflaged in bougainvillaea. The boy stopped before a cottage with a palm-leaf roof.

In front of it was a long tile terrace with a hemp hammock strung across it. The room inside had whitewashed walls and contained only a bed, a table, and a chair. Parasoling over the cottage was a giant tree which bore leaves shaped like fans. The encounter of the setting sun and rising moon had combined to paint everything in the changing colors of mercury.

As Lillian opened a bureau drawer, a mouse that had been making a nest of magnolia petals suddenly fled.

She showered and dressed hastily, feeling that perhaps the beauty and velvety softness of the night might not last, that if she delayed it would change to coldness and harshness. She put on the only dress she had that matched the bright flowers, an orange cotton. Then she opened the screen door. The night lay unchanged, serene, filled with tropical whisperings, as if leaves, birds, and sea breezes possessed musicalities unknown to northern countries, as if the richness of the scents kept them all intently alive.

The tiles under her bare feet were warm. The perfume she had sprayed on herself evaporated before the stronger perfumes of carnation and honeysuckle.

She walked back to the wide terrace where people sat on deck chairs waiting for each other and for dinner.

The expanse of sky was like an infinite canvas on which human beings were incapable of projecting images from their human life because they would seem out of scale and absurd.

Lillian felt that nature was so powerful it absorbed her into itself. It was a drug for forgetting. People seemed warmer and nearer, as the stars seemed nearer and the moon warmer.

The sea's orchestration carried away half the spoken words and made talking and laughing seem a mere casual accompaniment, like the sound of birds. Words had no weight. The intensity of the colors made them float in space like balloons, and the velvet texture of the climate gave them a purely decorative quality like no other flowers. They had no abstract meaning, being received by the senses which only recognized touch, smell, and vision, so that these people sitting in their chairs became a part of a vivid animated mural. A brown shoulder emerging from a white dress, the limpidity of a smile in a tanned face, the muscular tension of a brown leg, seemed more eloquent than the voices.