“But if Apolis is also a man of action?” said the Princess mysteriously. “Ah, I must not say more, but you cannot imagine how much it might mean to your brother if you could attach him to your cause, and that can only be by attaching him to yourself.”
“A sort of private Byron?” suggested Zoe scoffingly, but Princess Emilia was evidently deeply in earnest.
“You don’t know what hangs upon it,” she repeated as she let Zoe out of the gate, and again Zoe wondered at the importance in her voice.
At the Palace in the evening the reception was of an informal kind, the Prince and Princess moving about among their guests and talking freely. It was especially a literary party, so that instead of the Balkanic athletes who had been prominent at these gatherings of late, the winners in the poetic competitions and the European press representatives formed the majority of those present. Very early in the evening Princess Emilia brought a slender, handsome young man, of an unmistakably Greek type of face, up to Zoe.
“I now have the pleasure of fulfilling one of my life’s ambitions,” she said prettily, “in presenting Apolis to Zeto.”
“And in doing so, madame, you gratify my own chief desire,” was the ready reply of the poet.
Zoe sought in vain for any remark equally compatible with truth and responsive to his politeness, but her failure passed unnoticed, for he was quite capable of taking charge of the conversation without her assistance. He had solved the difficulty of talking about himself without appearing egotistical, by regarding his own history entirely from a literary point of view, producing, as it were, a monograph from it in response to any turn of the talk. Zoe found it quite interesting to note the ingenuity with which he adapted the most hopeless conditions to his purpose, though she was conscious of an uneasy doubt as to the literal veracity of all the experiences he described. When she came to analyse them afterwards, however, she discovered that he had mentioned very few facts, since most of his descriptions concerned feelings and impressions which he had experienced, or might have experienced, in given circumstances. The principal landmarks which emerged from the flood were a long sojourn in Paris, and the cause which led to it, a quarrel with his father—recounted with exquisite but not exactly filial humour—over a beautiful girl whom he had not been allowed to marry. For her sake, therefore, he was an exile from the rocky island, the beloved home of his forefathers, in the unsympathetic West.
“That is the lady to whom you have written as Meteora?” asked Zoe. “Was it her real name?”
“In my earlier poems—yes, mademoiselle. Let me see, what was her real name—Xenocraté? Praxinoë? I cannot remember! How a man’s memory betrays him!”
“But some of the poems to Meteora were among the latest in the book!” objected Zoe.