As for reaching the Acropolis who shall say that we ever do it, or that when Jacob woke next morning he found anything hard and durable to keep for ever?  Still, he went with them to Constantinople.

Sandra Wentworth Williams certainly woke to find a copy of Donne’s poems upon her dressing-table.  And the book would be stood on the shelf in the English country house where Sally Duggan’s Life of Father Damien in verse would join it one of these days.  There were ten or twelve little volumes already.  Strolling in at dusk, Sandra would open the books and her eyes would brighten (but not at the print), and subsiding into the arm-chair she would suck back again the soul of the moment; or, for sometimes she was restless, would pull out book after book and swing across the whole space of her life like an acrobat from bar to bar.  She had had her moments.  Meanwhile, the great clock on the landing ticked and Sandra would hear time accumulating, and ask herself, “What for?  What for?”

“What for?  What for?” Sandra would say, putting the book back, and strolling to the looking-glass and pressing her hair.  And Miss Edwards would be startled at dinner, as she opened her mouth to admit roast mutton, by Sandra’s sudden solicitude:  “Are you happy, Miss Edwards?”—­a thing Cissy Edwards hadn’t thought of for years.

“What for?  What for?” Jacob never asked himself any such questions, to judge by the way he laced his boots; shaved himself; to judge by the depth of his sleep that night, with the wind fidgeting at the shutters, and half-a-dozen mosquitoes singing in his ears.  He was young—­a man.  And then Sandra was right when she judged him to be credulous as yet.  At forty it might be a different matter.  Already he had marked the things he liked in Donne, and they were savage enough.  However, you might place beside them passages of the purest poetry in Shakespeare.

But the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens, rolling it, one might suppose, with a sort of trampling energy of mood which forbids too close an analysis of the feelings of any single person, or inspection of features.  All faces—­Greek, Levantine, Turkish, English—­would have looked much the same in that darkness.  At length the columns and the Temples whiten, yellow, turn rose; and the Pyramids and St. Peter’s arise, and at last sluggish St. Paul’s looms up.

The Christians have the right to rouse most cities with their interpretation of the day’s meaning.  Then, less melodiously, dissenters of different sects issue a cantankerous emendation.  The steamers, resounding like gigantic tuning-forks, state the old old fact—­how there is a sea coldly, greenly, swaying outside.  But nowadays it is the thin voice of duty, piping in a white thread from the top of a funnel, that collects the largest multitudes, and night is nothing but a long-drawn sigh between hammer-strokes, a deep breath—­you can hear it from an open window even in the heart of London.