But then Jacob Flanders was not at all of his own way of thinking—­far from it, Bonamy sighed, laying the thin sheets of notepaper on the table and falling into thought about Jacob’s character, not for the first time.

The trouble was this romantic vein in him.  “But mixed with the stupidity which leads him into these absurd predicaments,” thought Bonamy, “there is something—­something”—­he sighed, for he was fonder of Jacob than of any one in the world.

Jacob went to the window and stood with his hands in his pockets.  There he saw three Greeks in kilts; the masts of ships; idle or busy people of the lower classes strolling or stepping out briskly, or falling into groups and gesticulating with their hands.  Their lack of concern for him was not the cause of his gloom; but some more profound conviction—­it was not that he himself happened to be lonely, but that all people are.

Yet next day, as the train slowly rounded a hill on the way to Olympia, the Greek peasant women were out among the vines; the old Greek men were sitting at the stations, sipping sweet wine.  And though Jacob remained gloomy he had never suspected how tremendously pleasant it is to be alone; out of England; on one’s own; cut off from the whole thing.  There are very sharp bare hills on the way to Olympia; and between them blue sea in triangular spaces.  A little like the Cornish coast.  Well now, to go walking by oneself all day—­to get on to that track and follow it up between the bushes—­or are they small trees?—­to the top of that mountain from which one can see half the nations of antiquity—­

“Yes,” said Jacob, for his carriage was empty, “let’s look at the map.”  Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.  To gallop intemperately; fall on the sand tired out; to feel the earth spin; to have—­positively—­a rush of friendship for stones and grasses, as if humanity were over, and as for men and women, let them go hang—­ there is no getting over the fact that this desire seizes us pretty often.

The evening air slightly moved the dirty curtains in the hotel window at Olympia.

“I am full of love for every one,” thought Mrs. Wentworth Williams, “—­ for the poor most of all—­for the peasants coming back in the evening with their burdens.  And everything is soft and vague and very sad.  It is sad, it is sad.  But everything has meaning,” thought Sandra Wentworth Williams, raising her head a little and looking very beautiful, tragic, and exalted.  “One must love everything.”

She held in her hand a little book convenient for travelling—­stories by Tchekov—­as she stood, veiled, in white, in the window of the hotel at Olympia.  How beautiful the evening was! and her beauty was its beauty.  The tragedy of Greece was the tragedy of all high souls.  The inevitable compromise.  She seemed to have grasped something.  She would write it down.  And moving to the table where her husband sat reading she leant her chin in