"Galaxidi?" said Mitsos. "I know what is in your mind."
"What, then, is in my mind?"
"The baby Sophia you left there," said he. "Indeed, Capsina, you should have been a mother. For Suleima said you had a way with babies."
"I should have married Christos," she asked, "and been a fish-wife of Hydra? Indeed, little Mitsos, I knew not in how high esteem you held me."
And she got up from where she sat, and made him a great flouncing mock curtsey.
"Yet you are right," she continued, "I had the baby Sophia in my mind among many other things"—and she thought to herself how it was there she had learned of Suleima—"but for that reason I would not go. It is of the ship-station I am thinking. Once we have a station there, how foolish become the Turkish forts at Lepanto. Nor should it be long before we take Lepanto itself. Yet, oh, Mitsos, sometimes even in the heat and glory of it all, there is nothing I would love so well as to go quietly home and live in peace again, for of late I have had no peace; I have had no moments of my own."
"They could not be better spent," said Mitsos.
"If that is so, God will take account of them. But sometimes my heart is a child; it cries out for toys and playfellows and silly games of play, knowing that its house and its food are secure, or rather not needing to know it, and wanting only to be amused. But I doubt the toys are broken, and the playfellows are all grown up."
And she stopped abruptly.
"But that is not often," she continued after a moment. "There are other things, are there not?—and I am grown up, too—glory; red vengeance; the sharing in a great work. No, I would not sacrifice a minute of these for all the games of play. Also I think that I and the silliest boy in Greece played more in one week, that first week of our voyage, than is given to most. See, it is nearly sunset; what of the evening?"