. But
the point is that for all my thirty-five years, I had no such experience
at all. And women are quick as lightning to perceive this. You can bring
them nothing which they prize with such tender solicitude as a mature
and inexperienced heart. Neither callow adolescence nor a smart worldly
knowledge of their own weaknesses is any match for it. And why? Well, I
imagine it is because they feel safe without losing any of the perilous
glamour of love. It gives the fundamental maternal instinct in their
bosoms full scope without embarrassing them with either a puling infant
or a doddery prodigal. It may even play up to a rudimentary desire to be
not merely the agent of an instinct but the inspiration of an
individual. Cleverness in a woman is very often only the objective
aspect of fidelity to an ideal.

"You may imagine I said nothing of this to the girl beside me. Instead I
asked her when she was going to get married, and she said 'By and by.'
When he came, not before. It was obvious that she awaited her destiny
without misgiving and that she was at that stage when women really love
vicariously or not at all. For she suddenly demanded if I was going to
take Artemisia away to England when my ship sailed. We had turned out of
the noisy _Via Egnatia_ and were climbing a steep, narrow street leading
toward the citadel, a street of an extraordinary variety of
architecture, whose houses lunged out over the roadway in coloured
balconies and bellying iron grilles. And the whole barbaric vista led
the eye inexorably upward till it caught the culminating point of a
lofty and slender minaret springing from a clump of cypresses and
glittering white in the morning sun. The street itself was still in cool
shadow, and at the doors, kneeling upon the fantastic little _paves_ of
mosaic, or rubbing pieces of polished brass, were bare-footed women with
picturesque dresses and formidable ankles.

"Yes, she wanted to know, but I discovered just then that a man may
work himself up to a certain high resolution without feeling either
proud or happy. One seems to go into great affairs in a kind of
preoccupied daze. It is possible the Latin, the Celt, and the Slav have
the power to visualize themselves objectively when they assume an heroic
character. We are singularly deficient in this respect, I observe. No
Englishman is a hero to himself. And a merciless analyst might go so far
as to say that my entire behaviour was no more estimable than M.