Later, he found himself drifting apart with the Danish Excellency; he drifted, that is, beside her, tall, slack of limb, absent of mind, while she tripped with apparent heedlessness, but with actual determination of purpose. As she tripped she chattered. Fair and silly, she demanded gallantry of men, and gallantry of a kind--perfunctory, faintly pitying, apologetic--she was accorded. She had enticed Julian away, with a certain degree of skill, and was glad. Eve had scowled blackly, in the one swift glance she had thrown them. 'Your cousin enchants Don Rodrigo, it is clear,' Fru Thyregod said with malice as they strolled. Julian turned to look back. He saw Eve sitting with the Spanish Minister on the steps of the little temple. In front of the temple, the ruins of the picnic stained the valley with bright frivolity; bits of white paper fluttered, tablecloths remained spread on the ground, and laughter echoed from the groups that still lingered hilariously; the light dresses of the women were gay, and their parasols floated above them like coloured bubbles against the darkness of the ilexes. 'What desecration of the Dryads' grove,' said Fru Thyregod, 'let us put it out of sight,' and she gave a little run forward, and then glanced over her shoulder to see if Julian were following her. He came, unsmiling and leisurely. As soon as they were hidden from sight among the olives, she began to talk to him about himself, walking slowly, looking up at him now and then, and prodding meditatively with the tip of her parasol at the stones upon the ground. He was, she said, so free. He had his life before him. And she talked about herself, of the shackles of her sex, the practical difficulties of her life, her poverty, her effort to hide beneath a gay exterior a heart that was not gay. 'Carl,' she said, alluding to her husband, 'has indeed charge of the affairs of Norway and Sweden also in Herakleion, but Herakleion is so tiny, he is paid as though he were a Consul.' Julian listened, dissecting the true from the untrue; although he knew her gaiety was no effort, but merely the child of her innate foolishness, he also knew that her poverty was a source of real difficulties to her, and he felt towards her a warm, though a bored and slightly contemptuous, friendliness. He listened to her babble, thinking more of the stream by which they walked, and of the little magenta cyclamen that grew in the shady, marshy places on its banks. Fru Thyregod was speaking of Eve, a topic round which she perpetually hovered in an uncertainty of fascination and resentment. 'Do you approve of her very intimate friendship with that singer, Madame Kato?' 'I am very fond of Madame Kato myself, Fru Thyregod.' 'Ah, you are a man. But for Eve ... a girl.... After all, what is Madame Kato but a common woman, a woman of the people, and the mistress of Malteios into the bargain?'