'For a year or perhaps longer,' he said gloomily.
Her natural instinct of defiant secrecy kept the flood of protest back from her lips. Already in her surprisingly definite philosophy of life, self-concealment held a sacred and imperious position. Secrecy—and her secrecy, because disguised under a superficial show of expansiveness, was the more fundamental, the more dangerous—secrecy she recognised as being both a shield and a weapon. Therefore, already apprehending that existence in a world of men was a fight, a struggle, and a pursuit, she took refuge in her citadel. And, being possessed of a picturesque imagination, she had upon a certain solemn occasion carried a symbolic key to the steps which led down to the sea from the end of the pergola of gourds, and had flung it out as far as she was able into the guardianship of the waters.
She remembered this now as she sat on the parapet with Julian, and smiled to herself ironically. She looked at him with the eye of an artist, and thought how his limbs, fallen into their natural grace of relaxed muscularity, suggested the sculptural ease of stone far more than the flat surfaces of canvas. Sculptural, she thought, was undoubtedly the adjective which thrust itself upon one. In one of her spasmodic outbursts of activity she had modelled him, but, disdainful of her own talents, had left the clay to perish. Then she remembered acutely that she would not see him again.
'My mythological Julian....' she murmured, smiling.
A world of flattery lay in her tone.
'You odd little thing,' he said, 'why the adjective?'
She made an expressive gesture with her hands.
'Your indifference, your determination—you're so intractable, so contemptuous, so hard—and sometimes so inspired. You're so fatally well suited to the Islands. Prince of Aphros?' she launched at him insinuatingly.
She was skilful; he flushed. She was giving him what he had, half unconsciously, sought.
'Siren!' he said.