"What is that fellow's name?" asked Lawrence Teck. "Just now he wanted me to take him along to Africa. He seemed quite unhappy, especially when I had to tell him no. Indeed, he gave me a rather curious impression of misery and recklessness. What is it? An unfortunate love affair?"
"So it's that," she vouchsafed, staring at him intently, "which starts men off to the wilds?"
"Sometimes it's that which brings them back from the wilds. I could give you an instance——"
They, too, were now descending the steps between the pools.
The leafy alleys, silvered by the moon, and redolent of flowers that had been made magical by the alchemy of night, surrounded them. They came to a spot where a circular wall of foliage, rising behind stone benches, hemmed in a fountain, above which a marble antique warrior was lifting in his arms a marble girl, who struggled against that seizure with a convulsive energy, while her upturned face wore a look of happiness. Lawrence Teck made the comment:
"It appears that a rather primitive Greek gentleman has found a nymph bathing in a pool. If I remember, mortals who tried to capture nymphs were liable to die."
"Yes," she assented, staring at the upturned face of the captive. "He should not have tried."
"But no doubt it's hard for them to be reasonable at such times, especially when the person that they try to catch seems so strange, yet so overwhelmingly congenial—the embodied dream."
"Then she should have prevented him."
"Perhaps she tried to, with the usual success when it's a question of love in opposition to fear."