Joanna and he were having tea at a little wayside hotel to which he had brought her in his trailer. The country air had reddened her cheeks, but Mario was whiter than ever, and his eyes danced dark and fanatical in his head. The girl had no answer ready to his tirade, and he expected none. He continued.

“You and your Bob may be companions if you please. Both of you free to come and go, to take other companions – as many as you like – to live apart, to discuss this theory and that when you meet. Very good. You might have his companionship. Does it satisfy you?”

Rolling her bread into balls on the table-cloth, Joanna tried to collect her scattered forces. She could never stand up to Mario in argument, and was so perturbed under his glance that her ideas seemed to melt like snow-wreaths near a bonfire.

“Can’t one have the two things together?” she appealed to him timidly.

“In theory, perhaps,” he replied, and as he spoke he buttoned up with an air of finality the high collar of his leather coat, “but not in practice. Not at least when I am the man and you the woman. There is at this moment a man at the corner table who has been looking at you, and I want to kill him for daring to do so. Is that companionship? Na! Let us go back. Waiter, the bill!”

As the two left the room, Mario holding the door open for her, glared at the man in the corner. He was an inoffensive young fellow, who had been struck, not really so much by Joanna as by the atmosphere engendered by the couple. The moment they had gone the other people in the room began to discuss them.

Another of their talks was in the park. It was strange how in Joanna’s emotions the park came to be associated with Mario, as the Botanic Gardens were with Bob. And in the same way the two wooings were bound up with their seasons. Bob’s young love, so confused and pathetic, had been in the early spring; Mario’s was in the late autumn. And autumn even more than spring is disturbing to those who give themselves readily to Nature’s impulses. For if in spring we are pierced by the innumerable points of flame which dart skywards from the ground, in autumn our senses are more subtly assailed. For passion’s sake then the earth is laying aside her ornaments. There is a new restlessness and rapture of bird life, a new sense of disquiet and elation. The wooded places are full of the intoxicating smoulder of fecundity.