or a few minutes; after a while she said:

"You remember the first time you met me?"

"Of course."

"I was in difficulties then. They culminated in the scandal of my
divorce case. Tell me, how did you think I faced all that trouble?"

"With marvelous courage."

"In what other way can thoroughbred people face an enemy? Suppose I had
lost instead of won, suppose Jimmy had been taken from me, do you think
it would have broken me?"

"I can't imagine anything breaking you," said Dion. "But I don't believe
you ever pray."

"What has that to do with it?"

"I believe the people who pray are the potential cowards."

"Do you pray?"

"Not now. That's why I was smiling when I looked at the minarets. But I
don't make a virtue of it. I have nothing to pray for."

"Well then, if you have put away prayer, that means you are going to
rely on yourself."

"What for?"

"For all the sustaining you will need in the future. The people commonly
called good think of God as something outside themselves to which they
can apply in moments of fear, necessity and sorrow. If you have really
got beyond that conception you must rely on yourself, find in yourself
all you need."

"But I need nothing--you don't understand."

"You nearly told me yesterday."

"Perhaps if you hadn't gone out of the room I should have been obliged
to tell you, but not because I wished to."

"I understood that. That is why I went out of the room and left you
alone."

For the first time Dion looked up at her. She had lifted her veil, and
her haggard, refined face was turned towards him.

"Thank you," he said.

At that moment he liked her as he had never liked her in the past.

"Can you tell me now because you wish to?"

"Here among the graves?"

"Yes."

Again he looked at the distant minarets lifted towards the blue near the
way of the sea. But he said nothing. She shut her sun umbrella, laid it
on the ground beside her, pulled off her gloves and spread them out on
her knees slowly. She seemed to be hesitating; for she looked down and
for a moment she knitted her brows. Then she said;

"Tell me why you came to Constantinople."

"I couldn't."

"If I hadn't met you in the street by chance, would you have come to see
me?"

"I don't think I should."

"And yet it was I who willed you to come here."

Dion did not seem surprised. There was something remote in him which
perhaps could not draw near to such a simple commonplace feeling in that
m