The sea surfaced again, as a modesty piece in the cleft of two brown hills. It was mineral green below an aberrant cloud—green of the jade that would be sold everywhere in the city except at the best jewelers, who, to a European clientele, showed no jade except the rarest: to them, Dakotas flying out of Rangoon and Saigon brought cargoes of diamonds, emeralds, amethysts, all that. Nor did they show much gold (which otherwise was everywhere, too, mostly in teeth but also on pens, watchbands, bangles, and the rims of spectacles, and wadding up hailstorms of cheap jade rings in Queen’s Road windows); but had, each, an elderly Sikh with turban and rifle on a cane chair at the door: a cigar-store Indian.

So the girl reflected—feeling, all but seeing, the ring on her finger as she walked and looked at the green sea. One of the tacking yachts came into view; and went about, as they watched it—doing just for them its solo turn on jade sea. They saw it pause, shake its white self upright out of its element; saw the sails briefly flail and slacken, the boom swinging in a panic of independence, at an utter loss, until it leaned, once more triangular, with its other shoulder on the wind.

Freddy of MI5—or 6, or 7—was a good sailor, no shouting, content to munch sandwiches and come in last.

They had arrived at a ramp of stones, down which they slipped and slid, reaching the bottom with a thud and a short run. She supposed the horse—Sir Cecil’s—had managed this with its usual aplomb. She began to understand why Sir Cecil rode.

“That’s the last we’ll see of the sea,” said Constantin, as if they were embarked on some endless journey to the interior. He said these things and they were always true. People would look at him in the street, curious that authority should inspire no fear.

“Granite and erosion,” he observed of the land in which they were now locked. There was grandeur in this bleached place where even the least of the hills strove, in its outline, to become a mountain. Not to the girl, with her undeveloped sense of such beauty—it was one of the things he hoped to change in her. The feeling for nature, when it comes strained through literature, is too luxuriant, too soulful: vieux jardins reflétés par les yeux—too much of that.

“Say some lines to me, Elizabeth.” You could open her at any page. Total recall, but of some previous existence—the virtuoso performance of a singer who otherwise knows not a word of the language. She had begun at the end, looked up the last chapter of experience, and how would she ever work her way out into this incarnate present?