“Dogs always bark when the moon is up,” she answered, with a semi-humorous gravity.
“As they bark in Athens?” he queried.
“Yes, of course.”
“If I am ever criticized,” he asked, “will you be my defender?”
“I shan’t hear you criticized.”
“How do you know that?”
“I do know it,” she said, looking at him with her honest brown eyes; “nobody will criticize you when I am there.”
He caught hold of her hand.
“And you? Don’t you often criticize me silently? I’m sure you do. Why did you marry me, Rosamund?”
They were sitting on the Acropolis when he put that question. It was a shining day. The far-off seas gleamed. There was a golden pathway to Aegina. The brilliant clearness, not European but Eastern, did not make the great view spread out beneath and around them hard. Greece lay wrapped in a mystery of sunlight, different from, yet scarcely less magical than, the mystery of shadows and the moon. Rosamund looked out on the glory. She had taken off her hat, and given her yellow hair to the sunlight. Without any head-covering she always looked more beautiful, and, to Dion, more Greek than when her hair was concealed. He saw in her then more clearly than at other times the woman of all the ages rather than the woman of an epoch subject to certain fashions. As he looked at her now, resting on a block of warm marble above the precipice which is dominated by the little temple of Athena Nike, he wondered, with the concealed humility of the great lover, how it was that she had ever chosen to give herself to him. He had sworn to marry her. He had not been weak in his wooing, had not been one of those men who will linger on indefinitely at a woman’s feet, ready to submit to unnumbered refusals. But now there rose up in the depths of him the cry, “What am I?” and the answer, “Only a man like thousands of other men, in no way remarkable, in no way more worthy than thousands of others of the gift of great happiness.”