'Yet you yourself—what were your words?—said you believed in me; you even wrote to me, I remember still, "conquer, shatter, demolish!" But I must always struggle against you, against your obstructions. What is it you want? Liberty and irresponsibility, to an insatiable degree!'
'Because I love you insatiably.'
'You are too unreasonable sometimes' ('Reason!' she interrupted with scorn, 'what has reason got to do with love?') 'you are unreasonable to grudge me every moment I spend away from you. Won't you realise that I am responsible for five thousand lives? You must let me go now; only for an hour. I promise to come back to you in an hour.'
'Are you tired of me already?'
'Eve....'
'When we were in Herakleion, you were always saying you must go to Kato; now you are always going to some council; am I never to have you to myself?'
'I will go only for an hour. I must go, Eve, my darling.'
'Stay with me, Julian. I'll kiss you. I'll tell you a story.' She stretched out her hands. He shook his head, laughing, and ran off in the direction of the village.
When he returned, she refused to speak to him.
But at other times they grew marvellously close, passing hours and days in unbroken union, until the very fact of their two separate personalities became an exasperation. Then, silent as two souls tortured, before a furnace, they struggled for the expression that ever eludes; the complete, the satisfying expression that shall lay bare one soul to another soul, but that, ever failing, mockingly preserves the unwanted boon of essential mystery.