The skins matched all the tones of chocolate, coffee, and wood. There were many white suits and dresses, and many of those flowered dresses which in the realm of printed dresses stand in the same relation as the old paintings of flowers and fruit done by maiden aunts to a Matisse, or a Braque. They had been unwilling to separate themselves from their daily fare in food, the daily appearance of a dining table.

All the people she had seen in Golconda were there: taxi drivers, policemen, shopkeepers, truck drivers, life savers, beach photographers, lemon vendors, and the owner of the glass bottom boat. The men danced with the prostitutes of Golconda, and these were the girls Lillian had seen sewing quietly at windows, selling fruit at the market, and they brought to their evening profession the same lowered eyes, gentle voices, and passive quietude. They were dressed more enticingly, showed more shoulders and arms, but not provocatively. It was the men who drank and raised their voices. The policemen had tied their gun halters to their chairs.

The natives danced in bare feet, and Lillian kicked off her sandals. The dirt floor was warm and dry, and just as the night she had danced on the beach with the sea licking her toes, she felt no interruption between the earth and her body as if the same sap and rhythm ran through both simultaneously: gold, green, watery, or fiery when you touched the core.

Everyone spoke to Doctor Hernandez. Even tottering drunk, they bowed with respect.

A singer was chanting the Mexican plainsong, a lamentation on the woes of passion. Tequila ran freely, sharpened by lemon and salt on the tongue. The voices grew husky and the figures blurred. The naked feet trampled the dirt, and the bodies lost their identities and flowed into a single dance, moved by one beat. The heat from the bowels of the earth warmed their feet.

Doctor Hernandez frowned and said: "Lillian, put your sandals on!" His tone was protective; she knew he could justify this as a grave medical counsel. But she felt fiercely rebellious at anyone who might put an end to this magnetic connection with others, with the earth, and with the dance, and with the messages of sensuality passing between them.

With Fred, too, whom she had once baptized "Christmas," she was unaccountably angry. Because he looked pale and withdrawn, and because he was watching, not entering. He kept his shoes on, and not even the monodic jubilance of the singer could dissolve this peregrine, this foreign visitor. And then it was no longer Fred who sat there, spectator and fire extinguisher, but all those who had been an obstacle to her efforts to touch the fiery core.