She smiled wanly and opened her eyes for a brief instant.
“Were you watching?” she asked.
At this he started guiltily, for he had told no one, not even his mother, why he stood nightly at the street-door.
“Yes,” he said simply.
“My poor son!” she murmured, her face tense with anxiety. “What you wait for will never come.”
“No?... But if she did, and I were not there? You see how it is, mamma. I must be there.”
“Yes, yes. One must always be there, waiting.”
Her face composed itself, and, after waiting a few minutes, and thinking she slept, he tiptoed away, his heart rushing before him to welcome the lady of his dreams.
(Yet how was it that, having reached the doorway and having darted a glance up the street, an expression of immeasurable relief lit his face when he had satisfied himself that she was not coming down that way?)
Darkness was beginning, and demireps issued from side streets to the Place. Greek women, flat-footed and unbeautiful, waddled by, virtuous and miserable in their virtue. They carried virtue with them like a shroud. The demireps, haughty and impudent, were like flowers in the dusk. Lights appeared in the shop windows and the street traffic ebbed. Plashing of waves against the quay almost level with the water less than a hundred yards away, could faintly be heard. The Dreamer, looking towards the sea for a robbed minute, saw divine Olympus, purple and august, glowing and dying in the glowing and dying sky. So all beauty faded and died, to be reborn richer for its ancestry, more wonderful for its age.