Sheila ignored her question, which was in fact uttered in so low a voice it might reasonably not have been heard. She went on to speak of the architecture in Tangier—the painting done by Moslems (“a sort of Abstract Expressionism, quite haunting”)—the beauty of the Mediterranean—the cypresses—Spain across the strait—the Sahara (“Do you know Hassan is fighting a Sahara war?—to put down a rebellion of some sort, he says, but it’s really for reasons of greed”)—the Moslem religion in which men and women live their lives with a continuous reference to Allah, to Allah as the arbiter and measure of all things (“a crime against another person is only a crime if it offends Allah as well—and nothing greatly matters that does not matter to him”)—the sense of isolation, heartrending solitude, which Sheila found virtually everywhere, even in the most crowded streets and bazaars.

“Still, I grew to like it. I saw that that was why I’d come—not to be alone with myself but to be alone,” Sheila said.

Monica, eyeing her closely, felt a prick of annoyance; perhaps of jealousy.

And was Sheila telling the truth?—did the woman ever speak truthfully, or only improvisationally? She had mentioned earlier, with a childlike sort of boastfulness, that, in Morocco, she’d gained back the eight or ten pounds she had lost before Christmas; she had gained back some of her “muscle tone”—this said while playfully gripping her upper arm, and then her thigh. But Monica did not see any significant change in Sheila other than the faintly golden tan, the olive-golden tan, which was already beginning to fade.

“But weren’t you in a circle of some sort,” Monica asked skeptically, “—expatriated Americans, Parisians?—artists? Weren’t you staying in a friend’s villa on the Mediterranean?”

Sheila made an impatient dismissive gesture as if such factors, mere people, counted not at all. “Some of the time, yes,” she said. “And I quite liked them—most of them. I like people, you know. But I went away by myself too, after the second week. They warned me it was dangerous—a woman, alone, there—a ‘Christian’ woman—a heretic—but it wasn’t precisely as a woman I traveled; and nothing serious ever happened.”

Monica stared at her. “Nothing serious—? But what did happen?”

“I’ll tell you another time,” Sheila said. “In any case it isn’t important. What mattered to me was being alone; being there; seeing something in the landscape, in the light, I’d never seen before.” She spoke slowly, meditatively. “Yes, it was new. I don’t think I’m deceiving myself. A way of seeing, an angle of . . . vision, you could say; a certain rhythm to seeing, as you acquire, in a foreign country, a rhythm of hearing. And now that I’m back home I don’t intend to lose it.”

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