the pillared portico and did not dare go in. He thought of the temple,
not so very much unlike this, on a far-off Essex hillside, where his
mother used to meet his father; and somehow this made him feel that if
Mariquita had failed him it would be a bitter shame and dishonour to
him. Very slowly, rehearsing cruel things that he would say to her
to-morrow, he opened the door and let the moonbeams search the
summerhouse. It showed a huddled figure that wailed a little as it saw
the light. He shut the door and moved into the darkness, taking his
woman in his arms, finding her lips....

It had all gone. He could remember nothing of it. He could remember
nothing of the joy that had thralled him for two years, that by its
ending had desolated him for two more and alienated him from women. He
knew as a matter of historical fact that he had been her lover, but it
meant no more to him than his knowledge that Antony had once loved
Cleopatra and Nelson Lady Hamilton; of the quality of her kisses, the
magic that must have filled these hours, he could recollect nothing.
Perhaps it was not fair to blame her for that. Perhaps it was not her
fault but the fault of Nature, who is so determined that men shall go
on love-making that she makes the delights of love the least memorable
of all. But it was her fault that she had given him nothing spiritual to
remember. When he came to think of it, she had hardly ever said anything
that one could carry away with one. She was one of those women who moan
a lot, and one cannot get any solid satisfaction out of repeating a moan
to oneself. He grinned as he thought of the alarm of his laboratory boy
if he should ever try in some cheerless stretch of his work to remind
himself of Mariquita by saying over to himself her characteristic moan.
Nothing she had ever said or done when they were lovers was half so real
to him as the tears she shed when she cast him off because the priest
had told her that she must; when she broke the tie between them with a