She made little of the roughness of the hill; and wore breeches, he saw, under her short skirts.

“Women like Fanny Elmer don’t,” he thought.  “What’s-her-name Carslake didn’t; yet they pretend...”

Mrs. Williams said things straight out.  He was surprised by his own knowledge of the rules of behaviour; how much more can be said than one thought; how open one can be with a woman; and how little he had known himself before.

Evan joined them on the road; and as they drove along up hill and down hill (for Greece is in a state of effervescence, yet astonishingly clean-cut, a treeless land, where you see the ground between the blades, each hill cut and shaped and outlined as often as not against sparkling deep blue waters, islands white as sand floating on the horizon, occasional groves of palm trees standing in the valleys, which are scattered with black goats, spotted with little olive trees and sometimes have white hollows, rayed and criss-crossed, in their flanks), as they drove up hill and down he scowled in the corner of the carriage, with his paw so tightly closed that the skin was stretched between the knuckles and the little hairs stood upright.  Sandra rode opposite, dominant, like a Victory prepared to fling into the air.

“Heartless!” thought Evan (which was untrue).

“Brainless!” he suspected (and that was not true either).  “Still...!” He envied her.

When bedtime came the difficulty was to write to Bonamy, Jacob found.  Yet he had seen Salamis, and Marathon in the distance.  Poor old Bonamy!  No; there was something queer about it.  He could not write to Bonamy.

“I shall go to Athens all the same,” he resolved, looking very set, with this hook dragging in his side.

The Williamses had already been to Athens.

Athens is still quite capable of striking a young man as the oddest combination, the most incongruous assortment.  Now it is suburban; now immortal.  Now cheap continental jewellery is laid upon plush trays.  Now the stately woman stands naked, save for a wave of drapery above the knee.  No form can he set on his sensations as he strolls, one blazing afternoon, along the Parisian boulevard and skips out of the way of the royal landau which, looking indescribably ramshackle, rattles along the pitted roadway, saluted by citizens of both sexes cheaply dressed in bowler hats and continental costumes; though a shepherd in kilt, cap, and gaiters very nearly drives his herd of goats between the royal wheels; and all the time the Acropolis surges into the air, raises itself above the town, like a large immobile wave with the yellow columns of the Parthenon firmly planted upon it.

The yellow columns of the Parthenon are to be seen at all hours of the day firmly planted upon the Acropolis; though at sunset, when the ships in the Piraeus fire their guns, a bell rings, a man in uniform (the waistcoat unbuttoned) appears; and the women roll up the black stockings which they are knitting in the shadow of the columns, call to the children, and troop off down the hill back to their houses.