“Mrs. Trachington is a female staying at our hotel,” said Manvers, gently wiping his face. “She has praying-meetings. This morning I was walking past her room, when she came out and asked me to look at some picture she had just got. It was a charming landscape by Gialliná, of delicious tone. But after a moment I looked up and caught her eye. There was a prayer in it. It is wicked that a woman with blatant prayer in her eye should possess such a picture. So I ran away. I came up here for safety.”
Tom laughed uproariously.
“Manvers is fanciful,” he said. “His is a morbidly sensitive nature.”
“My dear fellow, you would have done just the same,” he said. “I don’t think Mrs. Trachington’s methods are at all straightforward. They are Jesuitical. Besides, I can’t go praying about all over the hotel.”
“Well, you’d better come down with us,” said Tom.
Manvers looked at Maud a moment.
“No, I’m going to stop here a little. Of old sat Freedom on the heights. I shall be free here.”
“But she stepped down, you know,” said Tom.
“So shall I by-and-by,” said Manvers. “That was after she sat on the heights.”
Maud and Tom walked down past the theatre and into the low-lying streets to the east of the Acropolis. The fresh oranges had come in from the country, and they passed strings of heavily laden mules and donkeys, driven by dirty, picturesque boys, bare-footed, black-haired, and black-eyed. It was a festal day, and the women had turned out in bright Albanian costumes, and the streets were charged with southern colour, and brilliant with warm winter sun and cloudless sky. Through open spaces between the houses they could see the tawny columns of the Parthenon standing clear-cut and virgin against the blue; for the moment the earlier and later civilizations seemed harmonious.