“That’s enough for me!”
He spoke gaily, confidently.
“Besides, I don’t really believe I’m a man to love like that. I only imagined I might for a moment, perhaps because it was twilight. Imaginings come with the twilight.”
“I could never bear to think, if a child came, that you didn’t want it, that you wished it out of the way.”
“I never should. But I expect lots of young married people have queer thoughts and feelings which they keep entirely to themselves—I blurted mine out. You’ve got a dangerously sincere husband, Rose. The whole matter lies in your own hands. If we ever have a child, love it, but don’t love it more than me.”
“I should love it so differently! How could maternal love interfere with the love of woman for man?”
“No, I don’t suppose it could.”
“Of course it never could.”
“Then that’s settled. Where shall we go to get out of the wind? It seems to be rising.”
After searching for a place of shelter in vain they eventually took refuge in the Parthenon, under the shadow of the great western wall. Perhaps in consequence of the wind the Acropolis was entirely deserted. Only the guardians were hidden somewhere, behind columns, in the Porch of the Museum, under the roof of their little dwelling at the foot of the marble staircase which leads up to the Propylae. The huge wall of the Parthenon kept off the wind from the sea, and as Rosamund and Dion no longer saw the whirling dust clouds in the plain they had, for the moment, almost an illusion of peace. They sat down on the guardian’s bench, just beneath some faint fragments of paintings which dated from the time when the temple was made use of as a church by Greek Christians; and immediately Rosamund went on talking about the child. She spoke very quietly and earnestly, with the greatest simplicity, and by degrees Dion came to see her as a mother, to feel that perhaps only as a mother could she fulfil herself. The whole of her beauty would never be revealed unless she were seen with a child of her own. Hitherto he had thought of her chiefly in relation to himself, as the girl he longed to win, then as the girl he most wonderfully had succeeded in winning. She put herself before him now in a different light, and he saw in her new and beautiful possibilities. While she was talking his imagination began to play about the child, and presently he realized that he was thinking of it as a boy. Then, in a moment, he realized that on the previous evening he had thought of a male, not of a female child. With this in his mind he said abruptly: