Naples is the corrected setting of John Marcher and May Bartram’s earlier meeting, a memory that becomes important when they reunite at Weatherend and discover how little of their shared past Marcher can reliably recall. The city anchors a handful of youthful encounters, but the recollection also exposes the distance between the romantic history they might have wished for and the sparse one they actually shared.

The Corrected Memory

At Weatherend, Marcher confidently says that he met May in Rome, but she corrects him: they met in Naples, nearly ten years earlier, while traveling in the company of mutual acquaintances. He also misremembers who accompanied her and which party had introduced them. May can supply evidence for the details, while Marcher accepts her corrections; his vivid-seeming recollection proves unreliable in its particulars.

The distinction matters because the storm Marcher associates with their travels did not happen in Naples. It occurred at Pompeii, where they took shelter during a violent thunderstorm while an important archaeological find was being made. Naples is the place of their meeting, not the location of that dramatic episode. Sorting these memories out leaves them with only a small collection of youthful incidents, too slight, they feel, to have grown into the close history that might have made their reunion easier.

A Past They Wish Had Been Fuller

As they look back, Marcher imagines the kinds of dramatic encounters that could have given their connection a more substantial beginning. He thinks he might have saved May from a capsized boat in the bay, or recovered a dressing bag stolen from her cab in the streets of Naples. These are counterfactual possibilities, not events: the point is precisely that no such rescue or shared crisis occurred.

Marcher also imagines a different opportunity for intimacy: if he had fallen ill alone at his hotel, May might have visited him, written to his family, and accompanied him on a drive during his recovery. In these invented alternatives, Naples becomes associated with the romantic or critical episode missing from their actual history. The city’s narrative significance lies partly in that absence: it is a real setting for their acquaintance, but the deeper bond Marcher longs to remember has to be imagined rather than recovered.