As Mrs. Clarke read them her fingers closed on the paper viciously, and she said to herself: 

“I’ll not go.  I’ll never go to them again.”

She told Sonia about the dinner.  Then she dressed and went out.

It was a warm and languid day.  She took a carriage and told the coachman to drive to Stamboul—­to drive on till she gave him the direction where to go in Stamboul.  She had no special object in view.  But she longed to be out in the air, to drive, to see people about her, the waterway, the forest of shipping, the domes and the minarets, the cypresses, the glades stretching towards Seraglio Point, the long, low hills of Asia.  She longed, too, to hear voices, hurrying feet, the innumerable sounds of life.  She hoped by seeing and hearing to fortify her will.  The spirit of adventure was the spirit that held her, was the most vital part within her, and such a spirit needed freedom to breathe in.  She was fettered.  She had been a coward, or almost a coward, false, perhaps, to her fortunate star.  Hitherto she had always followed Nietzsche’s advice and had lived perilously.  Was she now to be governed by fear?  Even to keep Jimmy’s respect and affection could she endure such dominion?  As the sun touched her with his fingers of gold, and the air, full of a strangely languid vitality, whispered about her, as she heard the cries from the sea, and saw human beings, vividly egoistic, going by on their pilgrimage, she said to herself, “Not even for Jimmy!” The clamorous city, with its fierce openness and its sinister suggestions of hidden things, woke up in her the huntress, and, for the moment, lulled the mother to sleep.

“Not even for Jimmy!” she thought.  “I must be myself.  I cannot be otherwise.  I must live perilously.  To live in any other way for me would be death.”

And the line in “The Kasidah” which Dion had pondered over came to her, and she thought of the “death that walks in form of life.”

As the carriage went upon the bridge she looked across to Stamboul, and was faced by the Mosque of the Valideh.  So familiar to her was the sight of its facade, of its cupolas and minarets, that she seldom now even thought of it when she crossed the bridge; but to-day, perhaps because she was unusually strung up, was restive and almost horribly alert, she gazed at it and was intensely conscious of it.  She had once said to Dion that Stamboul was the City of the Unknown God, and now suddenly she felt that she was nearing His altars.  A strange, perverse desire to pray came to her; to go up into one of the mosques of this mysterious city which she loved, and to pray for her release from Dion Leith.

She smiled faintly as this idea came into her mind.  The Unknown God had surely made her as she was, had made her a huntress.  Well, then, surely she had the right to pray to Him to give her a free course for her temperament.

“Santa Sophia!” she called to the coachman.