"'That's our steward,' I told her. 'He doesn't think much of you. He thought you were giving him the glad eye, I'm afraid.'
"'Him!' she queried, and regarded him for a moment. And then she changed the subject. She wished to know if I was going up to see Artemisia. And when I hinted at the early hour, she declared that it was a good time. She would be so glad, she thought. And when she said she was ready, having bought all she needed, and that a carriage was waiting for her up the hill near the _Via Egnatia_, I took her basket and we moved on. And we left Mr. Tonderbeg behind, left him full of the inward rage which boils up when envy and decorum are run together in our hearts. There was nothing the matter with him, understand. I mean, there was nothing one could do for him. He was one of those bland human organisms who simply fly right off the handle when they encounter a foreign morality. It's an ethnical problem, I suppose. Why do I tell you of this Tonderbeg? Irrelevant? Well, but he wouldn't have been, if I had carried out the momentous scheme I had in mind. I thought you would have grasped that. And I sometimes wonder whether his respectable mind had not elucidated some inkling of this from a word perhaps overheard as he passed the captain's door, on the voyage home, and nursed a grievance against fate for depriving him of that piquant experience which I had had in store for him!
"And when we had climbed into the grubby little hired hack, a very different vehicle from Mr. Kinaitsky's patrician affair, and the die seemed definitely cast, I found myself recalling again and again a remark which old Jack Evans had made his own. 'A man's a damn fool to bother with a gel at all, unless he's going to marry her!' The ripe fruit of his experience in the world! I had agreed with him, too. I recalled his short, stout, unromantic figure standing in an authoritative attitude with his hand on the rail, looking across the blue glitter of the Mediterranean, seeing nothing of it, dreaming of that semi-detached affair in Threxford which contained the angel child and her desiccated mother. It is easy enough and indicative of wisdom to agree in such cases. But I would remind you that I had no such dream of the future in _my_ head as I sat beside this foreign girl and drove along the _Via Egnatia_ to meet Captain Macedoine's daughter once more. With more experience of the world of sentiment I might possibly have gone so far as to envisage the probable outcome of the adventure. But the point is that for all my thirty-five years, I had no such experience at all. And women are quick as lightning to perceive this. You can bring them nothing which they prize with such tender solicitude as a mature and inexperienced heart. Neither callow adolescence nor a smart worldly knowledge of their own weaknesses is any match for it. And why? Well, I imagine it is because they feel safe without losing any of the perilous glamour of love. It gives the fundamental maternal instinct in their bosoms full scope without embarrassing them with either a puling infant or a doddery prodigal. It may even play up to a rudimentary desire to be not merely the agent of an instinct but the inspiration of an individual. Cleverness in a woman is very often only the objective aspect of fidelity to an ideal.