"It's like having your warm hand around my wrist. It's still warm, like your own hand. I'm your prisoner, Sabina."

Lillian looked at Sabina's face, the fevered profile taut, so taut that she shivered a little, knowing that when Sabina's face turned towards her she could no longer see the details of it for its blazing quality. Sabina's mouth always a little open, pouring forth that eddying voice which gave one vertigo.

Lillian caught an expression on her face of such knowingness that she was startled. Sabina's whole body seemed suddenly charged with experience, as if discolored from it, filled with violet shadows, bowed down by weary eyelids. In one instant she looked marked by long fevers, by an unconquerable fatigue. Lillian could see all the charred traces of the fires she had traversed. She expected her eyes and hair to turn ashen.

But the next moment her eyes and hair gleamed more brilliantly than ever, her face became uncannily clear, completely innocent, an innocence which radiated like a gem. She could shed her whole life in one moment of forgetfulness, stand absolutely washed of it, as if she were standing at the very beginning of it.

So many questions rushed to Lillian's mind, but now she knew Sabina hated questions. Sabina's essence slipped out between the facts. So Lillian smiled and was silent, listening merely to Sabina's voice, the way its hoarseness changed from rustiness to a whisper, a faint gasp, so that the hotness of her breath touched her face.

She watched her smoke hungrily, as if smoking, talking and moving were all desperately necessary to her, like breathing, and she did them all with such reckless intensity.

When Lillian and Sabina met one night under the red light of the café they recognized in each other similar moods: they would laugh at him, the man.

"He's working so hard, so hard he's in a daze," said Lillian.

"He talks about nothing but painting."

She was lonely, deep down, to think that Jay had been at his work for two weeks without noticing either of them. And her loneliness drew her close to Sabina.

"He was glad we were going out together, he said it would give him a chance to work. He hasn't any idea of time—he doesn't even know what day of the week it is. He doesn't give a damn about anybody or anything."

A feeling of immense loneliness invaded them both.

They walked as if they wanted to walk away from their mood, as if they wanted to walk into another world. They walked up the hill of Montmartre with little houses lying on the hillside like heather. They heard music, music so off tune that they did not recognize it as music they heard every day. They slid into a shaft of light from where this music came—into a room which seemed built of granified smoke and crystallized human breath. A room with a painted star on the ceiling, and a wooden, pock-marked Christ nailed to the wall. Gusts of weary, petrified songs, so dusty with use. Faces like empty glasses. The musicians made of rubber like the elastic rubber-soled night.