something startled her in the night, some bird or small animal about the tent, she found herself unable to drop off to sleep again. She lay looking at the pattern of the poplar trees like a fretwork on the moonlit roof. It was so still outside that she could hear fish jumping in the bay and Dane’s steady breathing in the cot beside her. She drew herself up and looked across at the black head against the pillow. She was glad to be able to look at him like that in the soft light without his knowing. She wondered as she had done several times how far his looks affected her, for she knew well enough she was crazy about them. She loved to move her fingers about in his hair, to feast her eyes upon the beauty of his straight and sensitive features, and to catch and hold as long as she could the expressions that crept out of his eyes and played about them. She understood well enough why women had gone mad about him. And she was beginning to understand why none of them had stuck to him.
Women did not stick to men they could neither dominate nor understand, she thought, the kind of women he had probably known, that was. She herself was determined not to try to dominate him, even where she thought she might do it, and she knew now that she was probably no nearer understanding him than the others. But at least she meant to try. That he was a creature of strange idealisms, contradictory impulses, desperate despairs, and fierce protests against divisions in himself she knew. She did not suppose she could fight his battles for him, save him from his weaknesses, but at least she was determined now to ignore them as long as possible. She had simply ceased to think of the things that had worried her a few weeks back, the possibility that he took drugs, his lapses into drinking.
As she looked at him he turned a little in his sleep and
