But she was more elemental, more dangerous, than a mere flirt. On that account, and because of her wide and penetrative intelligence, he could not relegate her to the common category. Yet he thought he might safely make the assertion that no man in Herakleion had altogether escaped her attraction. He thought he might apply this generalisation from M. Lafarge, or Malteios, or Don Rodrigo Valdez, down to the chasseur who picked up her handkerchief. (Her handkerchief! ah, yes! she could always be traced, as in a paper-chase, by her scattered possessions--a handkerchief, a glove, a cigarette-case, a gardenia, a purse full of money, a powder-puff--frivolities doubly delightful and doubly irritating in a being so terrifyingly elemental, so unassailably and sarcastically intelligent.) Eve, the child he had known unaccountable, passionate, embarrassing, who had written him the precocious letters on every topic in a variety of tongues, imaginative exceedingly, copiously illustrated, bursting occasionally into erratic and illegible verse; Eve, with her desperate and excessive passions; Eve, grown to womanhood, grown into a firebrand! He had been entertained, but at the same time slightly offended, to find her grown; his conception of her was disarranged; he had felt almost a sense of outrage in seeing her heavy hair piled upon her head; he had looked curiously at the uncovered nape of her neck, the hair brushed upwards and slightly curling, where once it had hung thick and plaited; he had noted with an irritable shame the softness of her throat in the evening dress she had worn when first he had seen her. He banished violently the recollection of her in that brief moment when in his anger he had lifted her out of her bed and had carried her across the room in his arms. He banished it with a shudder and a revulsion, as he might have banished a suggestion of incest. Springing to his feet, he went forward to meet the carriages; the shadowed valley was flicked by the bright uniforms of the chasseurs on the boxes and the summer dresses of the women in the victorias; the laughter of the Danish Excellency already reached his ears above the hum of talk and the sliding hoofs of the horses as they advanced cautiously down the hill, straining back against their harness, and bringing with them at every step a little shower of stones from the rough surface of the road. The younger men, Greeks, and secretaries of legations, rode by the side of the carriages. The Danish Excellency was the first to alight, fat and babbling in a pink muslin dress with innumerable flounces; Julian turned aside to hide his smile. Madame Lafarge descended with her customary weightiness, beaming without benevolence but with a tyrannical proprietorship over all her guests. She graciously accorded her hand to Julian. The chasseurs were already busy with wicker baskets. 'The return to Nature,' Alexander Christopoulos whispered to Eve.