She remembered what Batouch had said.  There was pluck in this man, pluck that surged up in the blundering awkwardness, the hesitation, the incompetence and rudeness of him like a black rock out of the sea.  She did not answer.  They rode on, always slowly.  His horse, having had its will, and having known his strength at the end of his incompetence, went quietly, though always with that feathery, light, tripping action peculiar to purebred Arabs, an action that suggests the treading of a spring board rather than of the solid earth.  And Androvsky seemed a little more at home on it, although he sat awkwardly on the chair-like saddle, and grasped the rein too much as the drowning man seizes the straw.  Domini rode without looking at him, lest he might think she was criticising his performance.  When he had rolled in the dust she had been conscious of a sharp sensation of contempt.  The men she had been accustomed to meet all her life rode, shot, played games as a matter of course.  She was herself an athlete, and, like nearly all athletic women, inclined to be pitiless towards any man who was not so strong and so agile as herself.  But this man had killed her contempt at once by his desperate determination not to be beaten.  She knew by the look she had just seen in his eyes that if to ride with her that day meant death to him he would have done it nevertheless.

The womanhood in her liked the tribute, almost more than liked it.

“Your horse goes better now,” she said at last to break the silence.

“Does it?” he said.

“You don’t know!”

“Madame, I know nothing of horses or riding.  I have not been on a horse for twenty-three years.”

She was amazed.

“We ought to go back then,” she exclaimed.

“Why?  Other men ride—­I will ride.  I do it badly.  Forgive me.”

“Forgive you!” she said.  “I admire your pluck.  But why have you never ridden all these years?”

After a pause he answered: 

“I—­I did not—­I had not the opportunity.”

His voice was suddenly constrained.  She did not pursue the subject, but stroked her horse’s neck and turned her eyes towards the dark green line on the horizon.  Now that she was really out in the desert she felt almost bewildered by it, and as if she understood it far less than when she looked at it from Count Anteoni’s garden.  The thousands upon thousands of sand humps, each crowned with its dusty dwarf bush, each one precisely like the others, agitated her as if she were confronted by a vast multitude of people.  She wanted some point which would keep the eyes from travelling but could not find it, and was mentally restless as the swimmer far out at sea who is pursued by wave on wave, and who sees beyond him the unceasing foam of those that are pressing to the horizon.  Whither was she riding?  Could one have a goal in this immense expanse?  She felt an overpowering need to find one, and looked once more at the green line.