oung man with the
little blond moustache and laughing blue eyes, whom she believed was now
in Athens flirting with the girls, her feeling was different. He had won
from her a sort of allegiance. She thought him the maddest, wittiest,
and most splendid youth in the world. She did not despise Mr. Spokesly
because he was not at all like Fridthiof. She could not conceive in that
stark and simple imagination of hers two youths like Fridthiof. His very
name was a bizarre caress to her Southern ears. How gay he was! How
clever, how vital, how amusingly irreligious, how careless whether he
hurt her or not. It was a fantastic feature of her attitude towards him
that she liked to think of herself as possessed by him yet at liberty to
go where she wished. She was experimenting crudely with emotions, trying
them and flinging them away. She had at the back of her mind the vague
notion that if she could only get back to Fridthiof he would take her
away into Central Europe, to Prague and Vienna and Munich, dream cities
where she could savour the life she saw in the moving pictures--great
houses, huge motor-cars, gems, and gallimaufry. She dreamed of the
silken sheets and the milk-baths of sultanas, servants in dazzling
liveries, and courtyards with fountains and string music in the shadows
behind the palms. Perhaps. Without history or geography to guide her,
she imagined Central Europe as a sort of glorified _Jardin de la Tour
Blanche_, where money grew upon trees or flowered on boudoir-mantels,
and where superb troops in shining helmets and cuirasses marched down
interminable avenues of handsome buildings. There was no continuity in
her mind between money and labour. Men always gave her money. Even Mr.
Dainopoulos gave her money, a little at a time. The poor worked and had
no money. There would always be money for the asking. When the war moved
up into the mountains again, as it always did after a while (for she
remembered dimly how the armies went crashing southward into Saloniki in
the war of 1912 and later fought among themselves and came crashing back
again, passing through the valley like a herd of mastodons), there would
be more money than ever, and the rich merchants would send away again to
France and Italy for silks and velvets and _bijouterie_. Ever since she
could remember money had been growing more and more plentiful. The
Englishman who had given her that splendid emerald ring and who had said
he would go to hell for her,