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cable-stitched sweater stayed a few seconds longer or had my girl been abducted by her new beau in the thunder and spray, I would have perished; for while the scene endured, some virile instinct rather than one of self-preservation had caused me to swim toward them a few insensible yards, and now when I assumed a perpendicular position to regain my breath I found underfoot nothing but water. I turned and started swimming landward—and already felt the ominous foreglow, the strange, never yet described aura of total cramp creeping over me and forming its deadly pact with gravity. Suddenly my knee struck blessed sand, and in a mild undertow I crawled on all fours onto the beach.

8
    “I have a confession to make, Iris, concerning my mental health.”
    “Wait a minute. Must peel this horrid thing off—as far down—as far down as it can decently go.”
    We were lying, I supine, she prone, on the wharf. She had torn off her cap and was struggling to shrug off the shoulder straps of her wet swimsuit, so as to expose her entire back to the sun; a secondary struggle was taking place on the near side, in the vicinity of her sable armpit, in her unsuccessful efforts not to show the white of a small breast at its tender juncture with her ribs. As soon as she had wriggled into a satisfactory state of decorum, she half-reared, holding her black bodice to her bosom, while her other hand conducted that delightful rapid monkey-scratching search a girl performs when groping for something in her bag—in this instance a mauve package of cheap Salammbôs and an expensive lighter; whereupon she again pressed her bosom to the spread towel. Her earlobe burned red through her black liberated “Medusa,” as that type of bob was called in the young twenties. The moldings of her brown back, with a patch-size beauty spot below the left shoulder blade and a long spinal hollow, which redeemed all the errors of animal evolution, distracted me painfullyfrom the decision I had taken to preface my proposal with a special, tremendously important confession. A few aquamarines of water still glistened on the underside of her brown thighs and on her strong brown calves, and a few grains of wet gravel had stuck to her rose-brown ankles. If I have described so often in my American novels (
A Kingdom by the Sea, Ardis
) the unbearable magic of a girl’s back, it is mainly because of my having loved Iris. Her compact little nates, the most agonizing, the fullest, and sweetest bloom of her puerile prettiness, were as yet unwrapped surprises under the Christmas tree.
    Upon resettling in the waiting sun after this little flurry, Iris protruded her fat underlip as she exhaled smoke and presently remarked: “Your mental health is jolly good, I think. You are sometimes strange and somber, and often silly, but that’s in character with
ce qu’on appelle
genius.”
    “What do
you
call ‘genius’?”
    “Well, seeing things others don’t see. Or rather the invisible links between things.”
    “I am speaking, then, of a humble morbid condition which has nothing to do with genius. We shall start with a specific example and an authentic decor. Please close your eyes for a moment. Now visualize the avenue that goes from the post office to your villa. You see the plane trees converging in perspective and the garden gate between the last two?”
    “No,” said Iris, “the last one on the right is replaced by a lamppost—you can’t make it out very clearly from the village square—but it is really a lamppost in a coat of ivy.”
    “Well, no matter. The main thing is to imagine we’re looking from the village
here
toward the garden gate
there
. We must be very careful about our here’s and there’s in this problem. For the present ‘there’ is the quadrangle of green sunlight in the half-opened gate. We now start to walk up the avenue. On the second tree trunk of the right-side file we notice traces of some local proclamation—”
    “It was Ivor’s