"Yes. They were the first things that struck me when I got here—the trees. They're different from ours, thicker, there are more of them … I don't know … "

"Yes, and so—"

He began: "Arcane, aloof, and secret as the soul … "

She sat motionless, resting her chin on her lifted hand. Her cigarette went out, and dropped to the damp mosses of the poolside. "Secret as the soul," she murmured. "Yes." She nodded softly, but did not speak again, and at times, as he went on, he forgot her presence and seemed alone with his own imagination; then again he felt her so close that her long meditative face, drooping slightly, seemed to interpose itself between his eyes and what he was saying, and he was chilled by the thought that when, in a moment, he ceased reciting, the face would be there, unescapable, rhadamanthine, like death at the end of life. He poured out the last words of the poem in a rush, and there was a long silence, an endless silence, it seemed to the poet, before his hearer spoke.

"You recite too fast; you swallow half the words. Oh, why aren't people in our country taught—? But there are beautiful things … " She paused, and seemed to muse discriminatingly upon them. "That about the city of leaves … I wish you'd write it out for me, will you? Then I can read it over to myself. If you have a bit of paper, do write it now."

Vance had the inevitable bit of paper, and the fountain pen from which he was never parted. He pulled out the paper, spread it on a stone, and began to write. He was mortified that she thought his reading so bad, and his hand shook so that he feared she would hardly find the poem more intelligible than when he had recited it. At last he handed her the paper, and she held it to her short-sighted eyes during another awful interval of silence.

"Yes—there are beautiful things in it. That image of the city of leaves … and the soul's city being built of all the murmurs and rustlings of our impressions, emotions, instincts … " She laid the page down, and lifted her head, drawing her eyelids together meditatively. "By the way, do you know what the first temple at Delphi was built of?" She paused, smiling in expectation of his enjoyment. "Of birds' feathers and honey. Singing and humming! Sweetness and lightness! Isn't that magical?"

Vance gazed at her, captivated but bewildered. Did he understand—or did he not? Birds' feathers and honey? His heart beat with the strange disturbing beauty of the metaphor—for metaphor it must be, of course. Yet bodying forth what? In his excitement over the phrase, his perplexity at the question, he felt himself loutish and unresponsive for not answering. But he could not think of anything to say.