ain ashore." Brief, curt,
attentive. That, he held, was the thing. To dwell apart, within a
shining envelope of secular discipline, unquestioned, unhampered, and
unloved--that in Captain Rannie's mind was the priceless privilege of
command.

CHAPTER XI

Mrs. Dainopoulos, who was born Alice Thompson, lay on her Tottenham
Court Road sofa with a Scotch plaid rug over her, looking out across the
sunlit Gulf whenever she raised her eyes from her book. It is not
extraordinary that she should have been fond of reading. Suffering
actual pain only occasionally, she would have found time hang most
heavily but for this divine opiate, whereby the gentle and gracious
figures of sentimental fiction were gathered about her and lived out
their brief lives in that deserted theatre of the ancient gods, between
the silent ravines of the Chalcidice and the distant summits of
Thessaly.

For without having in any degree an original imagination she had a very
lively one. The people in books were quite as real to her as the people
around her. Just as she followed the characters in a book while reading,
so she only knew actual human beings while they were in the room with
her. As she read her books, so she read people, with intense interest as
how it would end and always longing for sequels. There was no doubt in
her mind, of course, that you could not have a story without love, and
this reacted naturally enough upon her judgments of people. She herself,
she firmly believed, could not exist without love. Nobody could. It was
a world of delicate and impalpable happiness where people always
understood each other without speech, responding to a touch of a hand, a
note of music, the sunlight on the snow-capped mountains, or the song of
a bird. Released from the indurating business of daily chores and the
calculations of house-keeping, and placidly secure in a miser's
infatuation, she lived an almost effortless emotional existence. She had
gone through many stages, of course, like most exiles, from petulance to
indifference; but by this time, as she looked up from her book and
watched the _Kalkis_ swinging in the current and disappearing from time
to time in billows of white steam from her winches, Mrs. Dainopoulos was
almost fiercely sentimental. Beneath a manner compounded of suburban
vulgarity and English reserve, she concealed an ardent and romantic
temperament. People, in her imagination, behaved exactly as did the
characters in the