To Sennier she had only spoken twice. The first time he had forgotten who she was. The second time he had exclaimed, "Ah, the syrups! the greengage! and the moonlight among the passion-flowers!" and had greeted her with effusion.
She still felt a sort of fondness for him; but she understood that he was like a child who needed perpetual petting and did not care very much from whom it came.
The impression she received, on coming back to this world after a long absence, was of a shifting quicksand. She also now knew absolutely how much of a nobody she was in it.
She had returned to Africa caring for it much less, but longing much more to conquer it and to dominate it.
On that day in October, a gorgeous day which had surely lain long in the heart of summer, when she saw again the climbing white town on the hill, when later she stood again in the Arab court, hearing the French voices of the servants, the guttural chatter of Bibi and Fatma, seeing the three gold fish making their eternal pilgrimage through the water shed by the fountain into the marble basin, she felt an intimate thrill at her heart. There was something here that she loved as she loved nothing in London.
From the night when Claude and Armand Gillier had returned to Mustapha after the visit to Constantine "the opera" had been to Charmian almost as a living thing--a thing for which she had fought, from which she had beaten off enemies. She thought of it as their child, Claude's and hers. They had no other child. She did not regret that.
Claude had long ago learnt to work in his home without difficulty. The paralysis which had beset him in Kensington had not returned. He was inclined to believe that by constant effort he had strengthened his will. But he had also become thoroughly accustomed to married life. And the fact that Charmian had become accustomed to it, too, had helped him without his being conscious of it. The embarrassment of beginnings was gone. And something else was gone; the sense of secret combat which in the first months of their marriage had made life so difficult to both of them.
The man had given in to the woman. When Claude left England with Gillier's bought libretto he was a conquered man. And this fact had brought about a cessation of struggle and had created a sensation of calm even in the conquered.