"There, you treat me as you do Ruru: I am being nice to you and you push me away," he laughed good-humouredly. "What do I want you for? Feminine charm is a great power..."
"You want to get power through me?"
"Not through you, but with you!" he said quietly with deep emotion, looking straight into her eyes.
"And I want you because of him," he went on, after a pause. "He is very difficult to get on with; you will help me: you love him and so do I—we shall love him together...."
She understood that he was speaking of King Akhnaton and her heart began to beat as violently as when she was listening to the whisper behind the partition. She felt that she ought to say something, but she was spell-bound as in a nightmare: she wanted to push away the clinging reptile and could not.
"You haven't been to see Ptamose yet, have you?" he asked suddenly, as though they had often spoken about it, while, as a matter of fact, they had never exchanged a word on the subject. Once more he caught her unawares like a naughty little girl.
"What Ptamose?" she pretended not to understand, but did it so badly that she was ashamed of herself.
"Come, come!" he said, with the same winking smile. "I won't betray you, no one shall know of it. And even if they did know, what of it? I would send you to him myself. He is a wise old man, a sage. He will tell you everything; you will know what the war is about. Only babblers and court flatterers imagine that we have won already. No, it is not so easy to conquer the old faith. Our forefathers were not any stupider than we are. Amon—Aton: is the dispute about a letter only? No, about the spirit. And indeed Amon is the Great Spirit!"
When he had moved from the armchair to the couch he had taken with him the staff with the gold sandals strapped to it. All of a sudden Dio bent down, took up one of them, turned it sole upwards and pointed with her finger to the image of Amon.
"And what have you here, prince? 'Amon the Great Spirit'?" she asked, smiling with almost undisguised contempt, as though she were really talking to a 'reptile.'