mind came running to her like a child, like a boy lost in a world of tall stone buildings and clamouring typewriters. His poor shivered ideas just fitted into the fractured edges of her own. He had been well drilled, but there was in him a little platoon that had broken away from the draft and enlisted in the Foreign Legion.
"You know," he said, "I never talked like this to any one before. What is there about you that makes one say what he really thinks? My mind feels as though someone had stolen its clothes while it was in bathing. How will it be able to go back to work to-morrow?"
Warm golden candlelight and cold golden wine: the little table in the corner was a yellow island in a sea of cigarette smoke, a sunny silence in the comforting hum of other people's chatter. In her own loneliness she saw his mind like the naked footprint on Crusoe's beach.
There must have been another footprint there too: the footprint of a mischievous godling who runs the beaches of the world as naked as Man Friday.
"The ideas I folded neatly and hid under a stone" (she could still hear him saying it, there was something delightfully heavy in his way of
