t this woman presented to her environment out there. Gruenbaum,
living under the shadow of his mountain, claiming from the world
'confidence in his dispositions'; Macedoine and his lieutenant devising
fantastic skin-games to be played out among the haunts of the old
Cabirian gods; Artemisia fighting her own sad little battle with the
fates and steeling her soul with reckless resolutions; even old Jack, no
bad prototype of the ancient ship-masters who ran their battered biremes
up on yonder beach to mend their storm-strained gear--all were more or
less congruous with this old Isle of Ipsilon, where Perseus grew to
manhood and from whose shores he set out on his journey to find Medusa.
But not she. She transcended experience. To know her made one
incredulous of one's own spiritual adventures. One nursed indelicate and
never-to-be-satisfied curiosities about her emotional divagations. She
once confessed, in a tone of querulous austerity, that she 'lived only
for the child.' Possibly this was the key. Beauty and Love, and even
Life itself, as men understood them, were to her the shocking but
inevitable conditions of attaining to an existence consecrated to her
neat and toy-like ideal. I am only explaining how she impressed me. As
you say, she was, and is, simply a respectable married woman. But
respectable married women, when you live with them without being married
to them, are sometimes very remarkable manifestations of human nature.

"Yes, I used to watch that woman on the voyage home. I was full of
curiosity about her. I was loth to believe in a human being so
insensitive to what we usually call human emotions. There was difficulty
about getting her ashore in Algiers. It was only when Jack said she
would get smothered in coal-dust if she stayed that she consented to go
at all. She came back with a very poor opinion of Africa. It appears
that it was hot and they did not know at the cafe how to make tea. A
mosquito had had the effrontery to bite Babs. I was informed of this
momentous adventure after we had gone to sea again, though Mrs. Evans
had been cultivating a certain evasion where I was concerned since our
talk about Artemisia. She had sheered off from me and tried to pump Jack
about the girl. He came to me, his bright brown eyes globular with the
news. What did I know, eh? Missus was saying she'd heard there was
something fishy about the gel. Not that he'd be surprised. It only
showed, he went on, how particular a m