“I don’t. I know we can.”
She looked again at the tomb before which they were standing. It showed a woman seated and stretching out her right arm, which a woman friend was touching. In the background was another, contemplative, woman and a man wearing a chaplet of leaves, his hand lifted to his face. For epitaph there was one word cut in marble.
“It means farewell, doesn’t it?” asked Rosamund.
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you’ll smile, but I think these tombs are the most beautiful things I have seen in Greece. It’s a miracle—their lack of violence. What a noble thing grief could be. That little simple word. It’s great to be able to give up the dearest thing with that one little word. But I couldn’t—I couldn’t.”
“How do you know?”
“I know, because I didn’t.”
She said nothing more on the subject that morning, but when they were on the Acropolis waiting, as so often before, for the approach of the evening, she returned to it. Evidently it was haunting her that day.
“I believe giving up nobly is a much finer thing than attaining nobly,” she said. “And yet attaining wins all the applause, and giving up, if it gets anything, only gets that ugly thing—pity.”
“But is pity an ugly thing?” said Dion.