‘But I never said I did. Romantic – I’m not that kind of middle-aged man. When I compared it to Africa, I didn’t mean I liked Africa; I dislike the thoughts of the wilds intensely, but they make me so appreciative of the state of civilization in which I am living that I should be sorry if they disappeared.’

‘So you feel civilized?’ said Sydney, beginning to like him. Till now she had been discouraged by his facile (what she called ‘professional’) manner, and by a middle-aged whimsicality that reeked of the Barrie play.

‘Much more so,’ said James Milton, cursing himself for going on like this, and for that very manner and habit of mind of his, of which no one could have been more contemptuously aware.

‘More than whom?’ said Sydney idly; but he refused to continue and she allowed him with unusual complaisance to swing her with him into a new mood. He stood looking up. The rocky crest of a hill to the east, at a great height, had been suddenly ribbed with scarlet. This vivid colour against the profound and quickly darkening sky was to Northern eyes a challenge to credulity: and Sydney looking up after him with admiration and hostility said, ‘I should never have believed it.’

‘I have always believed it,’ said James Milton, ‘but it is surprising to see.’

‘You’ll see a hundred others,’ she told him; and they hurried on, discussing in relation to this line of coast the phenomena of sunset. When they had come out into the road they walked more slowly between the lines of chestnut trees, watching the light fade from the enormous faces of the hotels, then from the villas above, which though suffused in dusk still glimmered. Night had come as always, with the catastrophic suddenness which does not for a long time cease to be alarming. They could hear forgotten windows being slammed indignantly, while lights springing up behind the curtains brought them out in hundreds in their uniformity; with here and there some figure passing regularly as a pendulum to and fro across the screen of lace. The hill smoked over with olives loomed, by some trompe-l’œil of twilight seemed to topple, above the larger hotels; but their own, in silhouette against the sea, stood out as they approached with a greater significance.