as if there were some sign to indicate their sex. Now, if God had made one green and the other red, like starboard and port! She lurched slightly and Paul took her arm. She spoke of his strength, of his voice. He was, she affirmed, with a little emphasizing gesture of her head, "extraordinarily old for his age." Why didn't he let his moustache grow? It would be so mignonne. She liked to see him smile. She was going to give him a nickname: "le sourire."
A few minutes later she was in Paul's arms, where she had fully planned to be. In the darkness he was laughing cynically to himself, for she had imagined she was the first!
There followed indolent days during which Paul recaptured some of the romance that had tinged the long-outgrown moods of the Clytemnestra. Apart from books, there were few mental events to break the pleasant monotony. Madame's books were thin, and rather warm, fare; tales by Gyp, Pierre Weber, Willy and Colette. She came from Port Saïd, and the fact that she adored that pestilential haunt was sufficient commentary on her calibre.
Paul sat placidly among the objects in his mental stores, indifferent for once to the lack of order. It sufficed that a glint of colour here or a sinuous outline there beguiled his attention, while the external world slumbered on. Again the sails collapsed heavily against steel rigging, then swelled towards the blue like a small boy puffing out his cheeks. The sheets snapped taut or slackened with the clink of iron blocks, and Paul gave idle instructions in a newly perfected jargon to Italianate French sailors who made witty, if indecorous, conversation over their half-spliced manilla and their tubs of caustic soda.
Then after weeks of doldrums there rose up out of a lapis lazuli sea a quaint little island five or six hundred
