She came with them now and soon they were in the water racing to the end of the jetty and diving into the flickering green transparency towards the white sand bottom. He watched the two of them sometimes, while he sat on the jetty and they tried to pull each other under, noting the differences of their characters and bodies. Esther was something beyond his past experience. She had the sturdy muscular form of a strong youth and the husky voice of a man. As she climbed up towards him, the water glistening on the smooth sinewy arms and legs, and as she shook the drops from her eyes with a boyish energy and seating herself beside him accepted a cigarette, he was conscious of that delicious sensuous emotion with which a man regards the friend of his beloved without invalidating for a moment his own authentic fidelity. His love for one woman reveals to him the essential beauty of all women. And it was characteristic of Evanthia to swim back to the bath-house steps and go in to dress, leaving them there to talk for a moment.
"Say, Esther, where does your husband go every night? Why don't he come home and eat early?"
"He go to some club," she said, blowing a jet of smoke upwards. "He very fond of his club. He read plenty book, my 'usban'."
"I don' know. Politics, Science, Philosophy. You go to that club, too. Your friend the Englishman, him with Armenian wife, he go there."
"I know he does. I was thinkin' about it. But it's a long way out here at night."
Esther laughed, a low husky chuckle, as she rose, flung away the cigarette and ran back to the bath house.
"Oh-ho! You love Evanthia too much!" she flung over her firm vigorous shoulder.
He knew by now that she meant "very much"; and as he followed her he agreed she was right. He had reached that stage when the past and the future were both obliterated by the intense vitality of existence. Only the never-ending desire to get her away into his own environment, to see her against a familiar background, held him to the plan he had worked out to get away. And it was the source of much of his irony in later, more prosperous years that he had come to see how essentially egotism and male vanity that never-ending desire happened to be. He saw the sharp cleavage, as one sees a fault in a range of cliffs at a distance, between his love and his pride. He saw that the fear in his heart was for himself all the time, lest he should not come out of the adventure with his pride entire.