“You kiss me,” said the girl. “You kiss me. I will try.”
He gave her a sense of deities reconciled, a feeling that, in gaining the man she loved, she would gain something for the whole world. Throughout the squalor of her homeward drive—she spoke at once—his salutation remained. He had robbed the body of its taint, the world’s taunts of their sting; he had shown her the holiness of direct desire. She “never exactly understood,” she would say in after years, “how he managed to strengthen her. It was as if he had made her see the whole of everything at once.”
Chapter XX
The End of the Middle Ages
The Miss Alans did go to Greece, but they went by themselves. They alone of this little company will double Malea and plough the waters of the Saronic gulf. They alone will visit Athens and Delphi, and either shrine of intellectual song—that upon the Acropolis, encircled by blue seas; that under Parnassus, where the eagles build and the bronze charioteer drives undismayed towards infinity. Trembling, anxious, cumbered with much digestive bread, they did proceed to Constantinople, they did go round the world. The rest of us must be contented with a fair, but a less arduous, goal. Italiam petimus: we return to the Pension Bertolini.
George said it was his old room.
“No, it isn’t,” said Lucy; “because it is the room I had, and I had your father’s room. I forget why; Charlotte made me, for some reason.”
He knelt on the tiled floor, and laid his face in her lap.
“George, you baby, get up.”
“Why shouldn’t I be a baby?” murmured George.
Unable to answer this question, she put down his sock, which she was trying to mend, and gazed out through the window. It was evening and again the spring.