“It reaches not so very far from my feet.”
Igraine hung out a flag, as it were, to try the man. She knew the look of Pelleas’s eyes, and she wanted Gorlois for comparison. Standing up, she shook the glistening shroud about her while it seemed to drop perfumes and to spark out passion. The man’s malady showed plainly enough on his face, but his eyes did not please Igraine. There was too much selfishness, not enough abasement. She knew Pelleas would have looked at her as though she was a saint in a church, and he but a lad from the brown ploughland. Igraine thought that she loved mute devotion far better than the bold impatient hunger on Gorlois’s face.
The man leant back and tilted his beard at her, while his eyes were half shut for the sun.
“I have heard it told that women are ambitious. Is it truth?”
Igraine, all gravity again, with her tentative mischief banished, looked at her knees, and said she could not tell. Gorlois waxed subtle.
“Are you ambitious, Igraine?”
“Ambitious, my lord?”
“Have you never wished to stand out like a bright peak above the world?”
“No.”
“Or to have the glory of your beauty filling the gate of fame like a scarlet sky?”