28
IN MAREMMA.
Or was it not the mere pulsation of reviving senses, the mere covetousness of a thing born only of the knowledge that others coveted it?
For months she had been beside him, and been no more to him than a generous boy who should have so defended and laboured for him would have been. For months he had seen her and heard her, and let her go and come, with no perception of her sex or of her youth, because his eyes were tired and his heart was sick.
But all at once he saw, and his dulled desires leaped from their ashes into fire, because other men also saw, other men also desired. But for them he would still have let her go by him, the unnoticed Nausicaa of his bitter Odyssey.
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