even in their passions there was no gross lust or strong appetite—they were incapable of the vile thoughts or the meaty desire of common people. As he looked at the comely thighs of the young women on horses, fascinated to see their shapely legs split over the strong good smell of a horse, he wondered if the warm sinuous vibration of the great horse-back excited them, and what their love was like. The preposterous elegance of their manner in the books awed him: he saw seduction consummated in kid gloves, to the accompaniment of subtle repartee. Such thoughts, when he had them, filled him with shame at his own baseness—he imagined for these people a love conducted beyond all the laws of nature, achieving the delight of animals or of common men by the electrical touch of a finger, the flicker of an eye, the intonation of a phrase—exquisitely and incorruptibly.
And as they looked at his remote fabulous face, more strange now that its thick fringing curls had been shorn, they bought of him, paying him several times his fee, with the lazy penitence of wasters.
Great fish within the restaurant windows swam in glass wells—eels coiled snakily, white-bellied trout veered and sank: he dreamed of strange rich foods within.
And sometimes men returned in carriages from the distant river, laden with great fish, and he wondered if he would ever see that river. All that lay around him, near but unexplored, filled him with desire and longing.
And later, again, along the sandy coast of Florida, with Eliza, he wandered down the narrow lanes of Saint Augustine, raced along the hard packed beach of Daytona, scoured the green lawns of Palm Beach, before the hotels, for cocoanuts, which Eliza desired as souvenirs, filling a brown tow sack with them and walking, with the bag hung from his shoulders, down the interminable aisles of the Royal Poinciana or the Breakers, target of scorn, and scandal, and amusement from slave and prince; or traversed the spacious palm— cool walks that cut the peninsula, to see, sprawled in the sensual loose sand the ladies’silken legs, the brown lean bodies of the men, the long seaplunges in the unending scroll-work of the emerald and infinite sea, which had beat in his brain from his father’s shells, which had
