"It is all over." He regretted the loss of this woman, even after having seen her in her tragic and fleeting ugliness.

At the same time, the injurious word, the cutting insults with which she had accompanied her departure caused sharp pain.

He already was tired and sick of hearing himself called "meridional," as though it were a stigma.
Yet he rather relished his enforced happiness, the sensation of false liberty which every enamored person feels after a quarrelsome break.
"Now to live again!..." He wished to return at once to the ship, but feared a revival of the memories evoked by silence.

It would be better to remain in Naples, to go to the theater, to trust to the luck of some chance encounter just as when he used to come ashore for a few hours.
The next morning he would leave the hotel, with all his baggage, and before sunset he would be sailing the open sea.
He ate outside of the _albergo_, and he passed the night elbowing women in cabarets where an insipid variety show served as a pretext to disguise the baser object.

The recollection of Freya, fresh-looking and gay, kept rising between him and those painted mouths every time that they smiled upon him, trying to attract his attention.
At one o'clock in the morning he went up the hotel stairway, surprised at seeing a ray of light underneath the door of his room.