she hated travelling, she could not eat things cooked in oil, and his pictures seemed to her to be growing more and more ugly and unsalable.

47

Finally they came one day to Ronda, after a trying sojourn at Cordova. In the train Julia had moaned a little at the mosquitoes of the previous night, and at the heat and dirt of the second-class compartment; then, always conscious of the ill-breeding of fretfulness, she had bent her lovely head above her Tauchnitz. And it was then that Campton, looking out of the window to avoid her fatally familiar profile, had suddenly discovered another. It was that of a peasant girl in front of a small whitewashed house, under a white pergola hung with bunches of big red peppers. The house, which was close to the railway, was propped against an orange-coloured rock, and in the glare cast up from the red earth its walls looked as blue as snow in shadow. The girl was all blue-white too, from her cotton skirt to the kerchief knotted turban-wise above two folds of blue-black hair. Her round forehead and merry nose were relieved like a bronze medallion against the wall; and she stood with her hands on her hips, laughing at 48a little pig asleep under a cork-tree, who lay on his side like a dog.

48

The vision filled the carriage-window and then vanished; but it remained so sharply impressed on Campton that even then he knew what was going to happen. He leaned back with a sense of relief, and forgot everything else.

The next morning he said to his wife: “There’s a little place up the line that I want to go back and paint. You don’t mind staying here a day or two, do you?”

She said she did not mind; it was what she always said; but he was somehow aware that this was the particular grievance she had always been waiting for. He did not care for that, or for anything but getting a seat in the diligence which started every morning for the village nearest the white house. On the way he remembered that he had left Julia only forty pesetas, but he did not care about that either.... He stayed a month, and when he returned to Ronda his wife had gone back to Paris, leaving a letter to say that the matter was in the hands of her lawyers.

“What did you do it for—I mean in that particular way? For goodness knows I understand all the rest,” Adele Anthony had once asked him, while the divorce proceedings were going on; and he had shaken his head, conscious that he could not explain.

It was a year 

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