"Gained!" Maurice said, still in the prosaic voice. "I don't think a Sicilian would be much good in England. We—we don't want romance there. We want cool-headed, practical men who can work, and who've no nonsense about them."
"Maurice!" she said, amazed. "What a cold douche! And from you! Why, what has happened to you while I've been away?"
"Happened to me?" he said, quickly. "Nothing. What should happen to me here?"
"Do you—are you beginning to long for England and English ways?"
"I think it's time I began to do something," he said, resolutely. "I think I've had a long enough holiday."
He was trying to put the past behind him. He was trying to rush into the new life, the life in which there would be no more wildness, no more yielding to the hot impulses that were surely showered down out of the sun. Mentally he was leaving the Enchanted Island already. It was fading away, sinking into its purple sea, sinking out of his sight with his wild heart of youth, while he, cold, calm, resolute man, was facing the steady life befitting an Englishman, the life of work, of social duties, of husband and father, with a money-making ambition and a stake in his country.
"Perhaps you're right," Hermione said.
But there was a sound of disappointment in her voice. Till now Maurice had always shared her Sicilian enthusiasms, had even run before them, lighter-footed than she in the race towards the sunshine. It was difficult to accommodate herself to this abrupt change.
"But don't let us think of going to-day," she added. "Remember—I have only just come back."
"And I!" said Artois. "Be merciful to an invalid, Monsieur Delarey!"