And Evan knew all that too.

Yes, he knew all that; and he admired her.  Very pleasant, he thought, to have affairs.  But for himself, what with his height (Napoleon was five feet four, he remembered), his bulk, his inability to impose his own personality (and yet great men are needed more than ever now, he sighed), it was useless.  He threw away his cigar, went up to Jacob and asked him, with a simple sort of sincerity which Jacob liked, whether he had come straight out from England.

“How very English!” Sandra laughed when the waiter told them next morning that the young gentleman had left at five to climb the mountain.  “I am sure he asked you for a bath?” at which the waiter shook his head, and said that he would ask the manager.

“You do not understand,” laughed Sandra.  “Never mind.”

Stretched on the top of the mountain, quite alone, Jacob enjoyed himself immensely.  Probably he had never been so happy in the whole of his life.

But at dinner that night Mr. Williams asked him whether he would like to see the paper; then Mrs. Williams asked him (as they strolled on the terrace smoking—­and how could he refuse that man’s cigar?) whether he’d seen the theatre by moonlight; whether he knew Everard Sherborn; whether he read Greek and whether (Evan rose silently and went in) if he had to sacrifice one it would be the French literature or the Russian?

“And now,” wrote Jacob in his letter to Bonamy, “I shall have to read her cursed book”—­her Tchekov, he meant, for she had lent it him.

Though the opinion is unpopular it seems likely enough that bare places, fields too thick with stones to be ploughed, tossing sea-meadows half-way between England and America, suit us better than cities.

There is something absolute in us which despises qualification.  It is this which is teased and twisted in society.  People come together in a room.  “So delighted,” says somebody, “to meet you,” and that is a lie.  And then:  “I enjoy the spring more than the autumn now.  One does, I think, as one gets older.”  For women are always, always, always talking about what one feels, and if they say “as one gets older,” they mean you to reply with something quite off the point.

Jacob sat himself down in the quarry where the Greeks had cut marble for the theatre.  It is hot work walking up Greek hills at midday.  The wild red cyclamen was out; he had seen the little tortoises hobbling from clump to clump; the air smelt strong and suddenly sweet, and the sun, striking on jagged splinters of marble, was very dazzling to the eyes.  Composed, commanding, contemptuous, a little melancholy, and bored with an august kind of boredom, there he sat smoking his pipe.

Bonamy would have said that this was the sort of thing that made him uneasy—­when Jacob got into the doldrums, looked like a Margate fisherman out of a job, or a British Admiral.  You couldn’t make him understand a thing when he was in a mood like that.  One had better leave him alone.  He was dull.  He was apt to be grumpy.