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thought she was like Joan in The Return of Eurydice —Joan, who had emerged from the wintry dark underworld of an unawakened life with her husband (that awful, good, disinterested husband—so like Aunt Edith) into the warmth and brilliance of that transfiguring passion for Walter, for the adorable Walter whom she had always imagined must be so like Miles Fanning himself. She was sure of it now. But what of her own identity? Was she Joan, or was she Pamela? And which of the two would it be nicer to be? Warm Joan, with her happiness—but at the price of surrender? Or the cold, the unhappy, but conquering, dangerous Pamela? Or wouldn’t it perhaps be best to be a little of both at once? Or first one and then the other? And in any case there was to be no goodness in the Aunt Edith style; he had been sure she wasn’t good.
    In her memory the voice of Aunt Edith sounded, as it had actually sounded, only a few weeks before, in disapproving comment on her reference to the passionless, experimental Pamela of Pastures New. “It’s a book I don’t like. A most unnecessary book.” And then, laying her hand on Pamela’s, “Dear child,” she had added, with that earnest, that dutifullywilled affectionateness, which Pamela so bitterly resented, “I’d rather you didn’t read any of Miles Fanning’s books.”
    â€œMother never objected to my reading them. So I don’t see . . .” The triumphant consciousness of having at this very moment the hand that had written those unnecessary books upon her shoulder was promising to enrich her share of the remembered dialogue with a lofty impertinence which the original had hardly possessed. “I don’t see that you have the smallest right. . . .”
    Fanning’s voice fell startlingly across the eloquent silence. “A penny for your thoughts, Miss Pamela,” it said.
    He had been for some obscure reason suddenly depressed by his own last words. “A world without goodness—it’d be Paradise.” But it wouldn’t, no more than now. The only paradises were fool’s paradises, ostrich’s paradises. It was as though he had suddenly lifted his head out of the sand and seen time bleeding away—like the stabbed bull at the end of a bull-fight, swaying on his legs and soundlessly spouting the red blood from his nostrils—bleeding, bleeding away stanchlessly into the darkness. And it was all, even the loveliness and the laughter and the sunlight, finally pointless. This young girl at his side, this beautiful pointless creature pointlessly walking down the Via del Babuino. . . . The feelings crystallized themselves, as usual, into whole phrases in his mind, and suddenly the phrases were metrical.
    Pointless and arm in arm with pointlessness,
    I pace and pace the Street of the Baboon.
    Imbecile! Annoyed with himself, he tried to shake off his mood of maudlin depression, he tried to force his spirit backinto the ridiculous and charming universe it had inhabited, on the whole so happily, all the morning.
    â€œA penny for your thoughts,” he said, with a certain rather forced jocularity, giving her shoulder a little clap. “Or forty centesimi, if you prefer them.” And, dropping his hand to his side, “In Germany,” he went on, “just after the War one could afford to be more munificent. There was a time when I regularily offered a hundred and ninety million marks for a thought—yes, and gained on the exchange. But now . . .”
    â€œWell, if you really want to know,” said Pamela, deciding to be bold, “I was thinking how much my Aunt Edith disapproved of your books.”
    â€œDid she? I suppose it was only to be expected. Seeing that I don’t write for aunts—at any rate, not for aunts in their specifically auntly capacity. Though of course, when they’re off duty . . .”
    â€œAunt Edith’s never off duty.”
    â€œAnd