"You may imagine I said nothing of this to the girl beside me. Instead I asked her when she was going to get married, and she said 'By and by.' When he came, not before. It was obvious that she awaited her destiny without misgiving and that she was at that stage when women really love vicariously or not at all. For she suddenly demanded if I was going to take Artemisia away to England when my ship sailed. We had turned out of the noisy _Via Egnatia_ and were climbing a steep, narrow street leading toward the citadel, a street of an extraordinary variety of architecture, whose houses lunged out over the roadway in coloured balconies and bellying iron grilles. And the whole barbaric vista led the eye inexorably upward till it caught the culminating point of a lofty and slender minaret springing from a clump of cypresses and glittering white in the morning sun. The street itself was still in cool shadow, and at the doors, kneeling upon the fantastic little _pavés_ of mosaic, or rubbing pieces of polished brass, were bare-footed women with picturesque dresses and formidable ankles.
"Yes, she wanted to know, but I discovered just then that a man may work himself up to a certain high resolution without feeling either proud or happy. One seems to go into great affairs in a kind of preoccupied daze. It is possible the Latin, the Celt, and the Slav have the power to visualize themselves objectively when they assume an heroic character. We are singularly deficient in this respect, I observe. No Englishman is a hero to himself. And a merciless analyst might go so far as to say that my entire behaviour was no more estimable than M. Kinaitsky's, that I had but one selfish motive, which was to protect myself from a woman's contempt. Viewed at a distance, I believe there was more in me than that. There is a radiant glow about it all, for me, which convinces that for once I had laid hold of the real thing. A magnificent memory! It is something, I submit, to cherish in one's heart even a solitary episode untarnished by any ignoble shame.
"'You shall see, my dear,' I said, enigmatically, and then the carriage stopped with a jerk and she appeared in a suddenly opened doorway, bursting out, as it were, holding herself back with her hands on the posts and devouring me with a look of extraordinary questing delight. It was as though she wished to divine the very roots of my emotions. I sat there, a tongue-tied fool, until Pollyni pushed me gently. Why didn't I get out? So I got out and stood before her.