“How strange!”
“Why strange?”
“Isn’t it?” she said, gazing at the six maidens in their flowering draperies of marble, who, upon their uncovered heads, bore tranquillity up the marble architrave. “How wonderfully simple and unpretending they are!”
“Are not you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t believe I think about it.”
“I do. Rosamund, sometimes I feel that I am an unique man—just think of a fellow in a firm on the Stock Exchange being unique!—because I have had an ideal, and I have attainted to it. When I was here alone, I conceived for the first time an ideal of woman. I said to myself, ‘In the days of ancient Greece there must have been such women in the flesh as these maidens in marble. If I could have lived and loved then!’ And I came away from Greece carrying a sort of romantic dream with me. And now I sit here with you; I can’t think why I, a quite ordinary man, should be picked out for perfect happiness.”
“Is it really perfect?” she asked, turning to him.
“I think so. In such a place with you!”
As the evening drew on, a little wind came and went over the rocky height, but it had no breath of cold in it. Two Greek soldiers passed by slowly behind them—short young men with skins almost as dark as the skins of Arabs of the South, black eyes and faces full of active mentality. They were talking eagerly, but stopped for a moment to look at the English, and beyond them at the six maidens on their platform of marble. Then they went on talking again, but presently hesitated, came back, and stood not far off, gazing at the Porch with a mixture of reverence and quiet wistfulness. Dion drew Rosamund’s attention to them.
“They feel the beauty,” he said.