Everything he saw was distasteful to him. He hated the blue and white,
the intensity and definiteness, the hum and heat of the south;
the landscape seemed to him as hard and as romantic as a cardboard
background on the stage, and the mountain but a wooden screen against a
sheet painted blue. He walked fast in spite of the heat of the sun.

Two roads led out of the town on the eastern side; one branched
off towards the Ambroses' villa, the other struck into the country,
eventually reaching a village on the plain, but many footpaths, which
had been stamped in the earth when it was wet, led off from it, across
great dry fields, to scattered farm-houses, and the villas of rich
natives. Hewet stepped off the road on to one of these, in order to
avoid the hardness and heat of the main road, the dust of which was
always being raised in small clouds by carts and ramshackle flies which
carried parties of festive peasants, or turkeys swelling unevenly like
a bundle of air balls beneath a net, or the brass bedstead and black
wooden boxes of some newly wedded pair.

The exercise indeed served to clear away the superficial irritations of
the morning, but he remained miserable. It seemed proved beyond a doubt
that Rachel was indifferent to him, for she had scarcely looked at him,
and she had talked to Mr. Flushing with just the same interest with
which she talked to him. Finally, Hirst's odious words flicked his mind
like a whip, and he remembered that he had left her talking to Hirst.
She was at this moment talking to him, and it might be true, as he said,
that she was in love with him. He went over all the evidence for this
supposition--her sudden interest in Hirst's writing, her way of quoting
his opinions respectfully, or with only half a laugh; her very nickname