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Hemingway describes the morning after the first night which Brett Ashley, the promiscuous heroine of The Sun Abo Rises, spends with Pedro Romero as follows:
Brett was radiant. She was happy. The sun was out and the day was bright.
“I feel altogether changed,” Brett said. “You've no idea, Jake.” (207)
Brett's men usually make her miserable: the first time Brett is alone with Jake Barnes after their reunion in Paris, she says, “Oh, darling, I've been so miserable” (24). So why is Brett here “radiant” and “happy”? The reason is that, as I discuss in detail elsewhere (“Brett's Problem” and “Mike Campbell“), Brett has difficulty reaching orgasm, which causes her to drift from one man to the next, and Romero has been the first man in a long time to gratify her sexually. Brett “feel[s] altogether changed,” and she implies that Jake “[has] no idea” of the magnitude of the change because many years ago he was “wounded … [in] a rotten way and flying on a joke front like the Italian” (31). Brett assumes that Jake, having long been sexually incapacitated by a war injury, must have forgotten what sexual fulfillment feels like. Why, therefore, does Brett not stay with the young bullfighter, who wants to marry her? She gives Jake this reason for breaking up with Romero after Jake has rushed to Madrid in response to her SOS telegram:
“… He really wanted to marry me. So I couldn't go away from him, he said. He wanted to make it sure I could never go away from him. After I'd gotten more womanly [by growing my hair out], of course.”