“Suppose you had never married,” he said, as they drew near to the city, “how would you have lived, do you think?”

“Perhaps for my singing, at first,” she answered.

“And afterwards?”

“Afterwards?  Very quietly, I think.”

“You won’t tell me.”

“I don’t know for certain, and what does it matter?  I have married.  If I hadn’t, perhaps I should have been very selfish and thought myself very self-sacrificing.”

“I wonder in what way selfish.”

“There are so many ways.  I heard a sermon once on a foggy night in London.”

“Ah—­that evening I called on you.”

“I didn’t say so.  It made me understand egoism better than I had understood it before.  Perhaps it’s the unpardonable sin.”

“Then it could never be your sin.”

“Hush!”

They no longer heard the nightingale.  The voices and the houses of Athens were about them.

As the days slipped by, Dion felt that Rosamund and he grew closer together.  He knew, though he could not perhaps have said how, that he would be the only man in her intimate life.  Even if he died she would never—­he felt sure of this—­yield herself to another man.  The tie between them was to her a bond for eternity.  Her body would never be given twice.  That he knew.  But sometimes he asked himself whether her whole soul would ever be given even once.  The insatiable greed of a great and exclusive love was alive within him, needing always something more than it had.  At first, after their marriage, he had not been aware of this greed, had not realized that nothing great is content to remain just as it is at a given moment.  His love had to progress, and gradually, in Greece, he became conscious of this fact.

His inner certainty, quite unshakable, that Rosamund would never belong to another man in the physical sense made jealousy of an ordinary kind impossible to him.  The lowness, the hideous vulgarity of the jealousy which tortures the writhing flesh would never be his.  Yet he wanted more than he had sometimes, stretched out arms to something which did not come to nestle against him.

There was a great independence in Rosamund, he thought, which set her apart from other women, Not only could she bear to be alone, she sometimes wished to be alone.  Dion, on the contrary, never wished to be away from her.  It might be necessary for him to leave her.  He was not a young doting fool who could not detach himself even for a moment from his wife’s apron strings.  But he knew very well that at all times he preferred to be with her, close to her, that he relished everything more when he was in her company than when he was alone.  She added to his power of enjoyment, to his faculty of appreciation, by being beside him.  The Parthenon even was made more sublime to him by her.  That was a mystery.  And the mystery of her human power to increase penetrated everywhere through their life in common, like a percolating