After awhile she went down the ladder and brought up grapes and granadillas, and four candles. Louis looked disappointed: he would have preferred mutton for supper, but for once said nothing as she stuck two candles on the coping and two at the foot of the mattress, and lighted them. They burnt unnickering in the windless, blue air.
It was the setting of romance. Dreams, play-acting came back. Breaking off a bunch of grapes for Louis she said:
"This is a roof garden in Babylon. You're a king. Oh no, it's Jerusalem. I'm Bethsaibe, bathing on the roof and you're King David. You've got to fall in love with me."
Louis was too self-centred, too introspective to make love to anyone; it was only alcohol that released unconscious longings in him: he had never, consciously, loved anything on earth: his desperate pleadings with Marcella on the ship had been pleadings for a mother, a caretaker rather than for a lover. His gross suggestions when he was drunk--the relics of his boyish first sex adventure--she did not understand. Nor did she understand why, when he had lain drunk and asleep that first night in the room below, she had looked at him feeling choked to tears; why she sat up at night watching him as he slept, vaguely discomforted and distressed; why she looked at him with blinded eyes. Had Louis not roused first her mother love to guard his helplessness, he would never have got into close enough touch with her to rouse the physical passion which might have thus slept on for long years. All her frowning, bewildered self-analysis could not explain the whirlpool of sensations into which she had fallen, which alternately buffeted her with vague unhappiness and drew her along to ecstasies. She did not realize that all her dreams of a splendid Lover had become mixed up with the family legend about "taking the man she needed" and had crystallized round Louis, the first man to waken physical passion for her.
In a warm rapture up here on the house-top in the still night air her conscious mind went to sleep; she lived her dreams. And Louis did not understand; out of the reach of temptation for three weeks, he felt very strong; her tenderness, her passionate love flattered him: he became a very fine fellow indeed in his own eyes as he lay there, half asleep, under the silver and purple of the midnight sky. He must be a very fine fellow--so he argued--if she could love him. She had won his reluctant admiration long before she had wakened his love.