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 Street, three doors from Chestnut. She had no conventions for unconventional conduct, and came and went with greater freedom than a Paris demi-mondaine would have dared. She came to care passionately for Anthony Jones, to care so much that when he held her her veins seemed turned to thin wires pulled tight through her body. If she as much as breathed, she was afraid they might pierce her through. But if they talked, words pushed them apart, he from her, and she from him.

Once, seated before the fire in the morning room sipping their coffee and eating Eastern preserves, Jones tried futilely to tell her all he had suffered from childhood at the hands of women. He told her of the grey-eyed, lipless governess that cajoled, flouted, and obsessed him before he was ten; of health-burdened English girls with raw skins and honey hair; of the pallid wives of Anglo-Indian colonels, and of voluptuous Arab women with hips which, in the language of the poet, Anu Ebn Kultan, 'were so round and heavy that they were tired.' The Boston girl listened coldly. It seemed to her it was not Jones who had suffered, but the women. However, to hear of the undeviating devotion he had always borne for the Persian princesses of the Mughal Court, dead for centuries, quickened her blood. Her New England conscience could not be reconciled to spending in his arms the time which should be spent in writing 'Sands of Araby,' and she would insist, with a high seriousness that amused him, that the book must always come first.

'Now a ten-minute rest from Araby.'