“It was rather imperial of her to want to trample them herself, then. And your Christomanos sounds as if he lacked humour.”
“I fancy he did,” uttered Martin.
Something in his tone made his companion look at him.
“Don’t be teased,” she said. “Tell me more about them. How did it end? Did he run away, or did she send him away, or what?”
“O dear, no! The day of his going was set before he came.”
“O! I begin to approve of your empress.” She was silent a moment, looking out toward the sea. “How was it, do you suppose?”
“Why, she was ages older and wiser and everything else. It was only that she was terribly lonely and bored, and he could do things that she couldn’t ask of a maid of honour, and was likewise incliné à comprendre.”
“O! And what about him?”
“He was so dazed that I don’t suppose you can tell anything about him. He must have been dazed all the time—by the enormousness of the distance between them, by her tragic history, by her personality, her eyes, her hair, everything about her. And to drop out of it all—to go back to being a simple Greek student, and live in a stair gable, and be despised by bakers and washerwomen when he had been the familiar friend of their empress, must have been hard.”
“Well, he had his moment,” she mused. “Did anyone ever have more?”