She was wet to her arm-pits and Digby Maur might have long sought a more suitable subject for a River Nat.
The sense of comfort and physical well-being, as he lay sunning himself, occupied Cyprian too completely for his attention to rivet itself at once upon the near intimacy of her, outlined on an emerald shield, defenceless in her slim fairness against his eyes.
Idly tossing twigs into the stream, one missed its mark and alighted on her bare shoulder.
She smiled in absent acknowledgment, but her gaze remained fixed upon the shifting reflections ahead.
He studied her then, with sleepy interest and, by the subconscious link between them, was aware that she knew his attitude of mind to be both puzzled and interrogative. He gathered that something was busily revolving in her brain which she would not yet disclose.
And as the leaves above them made changing patterns upon his own rapidly browning limbs, he forgot the scantiness of his attire and this outright defiance of all safeguarding law which stood between him and the whip of that Master Force from whose dominion she had despairingly wondered whether Mankind would ever be free.
Once-known sentences in Greek intruded, word by word, upon his brain, till the whole resolved itself into a fragment from Plato's immortal Republic preserved fresh, since, on the earlier waxen tablets of the mind, impressions remain cut singly and deep, though neglected for long periods in the crowded years which follow:
He saw himself again, an angular youth still in the magic teens, wrestling studiously with the paragraph; his sympathies completely with Thrasymachus of Chalcedon and his subsequent bull-like attack upon Polemarchus and Socrates, when, "playing the fool together in mutual complaisance," they had expanded the drivellings of old Cephalus concerning the abatement of his appetites into an interminable and exceedingly toilsome-to-translate discussion on the nature of Justice.