She only smiled in answer, and put out one hand towards him. It fell listlessly on to the sheets as though she had no energy to hold it up. 'You child,' he said, 'you make me feel coarse and vulgar beside you. Here am I, burning for battle, and there you lie, wasting time, wasting youth, half-asleep, luxurious, and quite unrepentant.' 'Surely even you must find it too hot for battle?' 'I don't find it too hot to wish that it weren't too hot. You, on the other hand, abandon yourself contentedly; you are pleased that it is too hot for you to do anything but glide voluptuously into a siesta in the middle of the day.' 'You haven't been here long, remember, Julian; you're still brisk from England. Only wait; Herakleion will overcome you.' 'Don't!' he cried out startlingly. 'Don't say it! It's prophetic. I shall struggle against it; I shall be the stronger.' She only laughed murmurously into her pillows, but he was really stirred; he stood up and walked about the room, launching spasmodic phrases. 'You and Herakleion, you are all of a piece.--You shan't drag me down.--Not if I am to live here.--I know one loses one's sense of values here. I learnt that when I last went away to England. I've come back on my guard.--I'm determined to remain level-headed.--I refuse to be impressed by fantastic happenings.... 'Why do you stop so abruptly?' Did her voice mock him? He had stopped, remembering Paul. Already he had blundered against something he did not understand. An impulse came to him to confide in Eve; Eve lying there, quietly smiling with unexpressed but unmistakable irony; Eve so certain that, sooner or later, Herakleion would conquer him. He would confide in her. And then, as he hesitated, he knew suddenly that Eve was not trustworthy. He began again walking about the room, betraying by no word that a moment of revelation, important and dramatic, had come and passed on the tick of a clock. Yet he knew he had crossed a line over which he could now never retrace his steps. He would never again regard Eve in quite the same light. He absorbed the alteration with remarkable rapidity into his conception of her. He supposed that the knowledge of her untrustworthiness had always lain dormant in him waiting for the test which should some day call it out; that was why he was so little impressed by what he had mistaken for new knowledge. 'Julian, sit down; how restless you are. And you look so enormous in this room, you frighten me.' He sat down, closer to her than he had sat before, and began playing with her fingers.