That night, as she sat in the tent, she saw before her the orange garden that bordered the Nile, the wild geraniums making a hedge about the pavilion of bamboo, she heard the loud voice of the fellah by the shadûf. Was it raised in protest or warning? Did she care? Could she care? Could any voice stop her from following the voice that called her on? And what was it in Baroudi that made his summons to her so intense, so arbitrary? What was it in him that governed her so completely? Now that he was far away she could ask herself a question that she could not ask when she was near him.
He was splendid in physique, but so were other men whom she had known and ruled, not been ruled by. He was bold, perhaps indifferent at bottom, though sometimes, in certain moments, on the surface far from indifferent. Others had been like that, and she had not loved them. He was intensely passionate. (But Nigel was passionate, though he kept a strong hand upon the straining life of his nature.) He was very strange.
He was very strange. She understood and could not understand him. He was very strange, and full of secret violence in which religion and vice went hand in hand. And his religion was not canting, nor was his vice ashamed. The one was as bold and as determined as the other. She seemed to grasp him, and did not grasp him. Such a failure piques a woman, and out of feminine pique often rises feminine passion. He was intent upon her. Yet part of him escaped her. Did he love her? She did not know. She knew he drove her perpetually on towards greater desire of him. Yet even that driving action might not be deliberate on his part. He seemed too careless to plot, and yet she knew that he plotted. Was he now at Aswân with some dancing-girl of his own people? Not one word had she heard of him since the day which had preceded the night of the storm when the ginnee had come in the wind. Abruptly he had gone out of her life. At their last meeting he had said nothing about any further intercourse. Yet she knew that he meant to meet her again, that he meant--what? His deep silence did not tell her. She could only wonder and suspect, and govern herself to preserve the bloom of her beauty, and, looking at Ibrahim and Hamza, trust to his intriguing cleverness to "manage things somehow." Yet how could they be managed? She looked at the future and felt hopeless. What was to come? She knew that even if, driven by passion, she were ready to take some mad, decisive step, Baroudi would not permit her to take it. He had never told her so, but instinctively she knew it. If he meant anything, it was something quite different from that. He must mean something, he must mean much; or why was Hamza out here in the green depths of the Fayyûm?