It was as if the island were leading a double life. The rains belonged on the green, other side, where mildew was a topic, whole lives were lived around mildew and the houses had electric hot rooms for leather and wool, and chintz chairs were put out in the sun on a dry day like a row of invalids, and there were few dry days. The rains were part of all that, like the invitations on which the gilt lettering might be read like Braille, and the salad being washed in permanganate, and the black taffeta New Look of the French consul’s daughter; people shouting “You’re mad,” “You’re daft,” “You, there,” at any exercise of will.

Sir Cecil might have rode in rain, oblivious; but for them this place was dry for a lifetime. It was a dust in which you might have come upon the bleached skeleton of a horse—the jawbone and smooth sockets, the serried ranks of phantom teeth.

That the earth should be so indifferent, or malevolent—the earth you had scarcely begun to harm.

Constantin said, “It is no use having expectations. We will know when the end is near.”

The knowledge would come in shifts of air and changes of soil, from smells of plants and of the approaching sea—atmospheric matters apparent, also, to Sir Cecil’s horse in its time, pricking its ears and picking up its feet and quickening its dank sides. The end would have come from such things as these, even before the scrub began again—a bristle, a tussock, a clump, a scrabbling of cover out of which hills less and less rekindled.

As to other forms of knowing, it was clear that knowledge ought to arise from, and in atonement of, a degree of suffering otherwise monstrously or comically useless: the raw material having been provided, it was the supposed duty of experience to make order of itself in such a way. That no such duty was recognized except by herself, that no abstract, mechanical process stood ready to perform its mitigating service, began to be realized by the girl and to threaten her with new, immeasurable labors. Nothing at any rate could be expected promptly or directly. Even immediate perception ran the risk of foundering in its impending reclamation by human systems, drowned in the relief of normalcy, submerged ignominiously in the very ginger beer.

“This is the last ascent.” Not comfort or a concession, it was information. When he got home, exorcised, he would calculate miles exactly on a map. He would enjoy his bath, his dinner. Today of all days, might believe himself in love.

The final pass was banked with a parapet of stones. Downward, the track innocently altered character, disappearing briefly into undergrowth and emerging already charged with rural purpose, quite at their service. They leaned on the stone brink of all this change.