From the moment Irene agreed to marry a foreigner and to leave Trieste, she also broke the bonds that tied her to her bank, her business life being only an extension of her family life; without one the other became impossible. There is no place for dreams in the counting-house homes of Greek bankers. The unexpressed devotion, the professional admiration, and the fraternal attachment which her two Apostolatos cousins had for her behind the granite walls of the Trieste mansion, in a strange atmosphere of strong room and harem, rendered precarious any form of compromise, at which, besides, she knew that she herself would never have been able to stop. Having built up her life on a basis of freedom, she considered that she had a right (without realizing how impatient she was to do so) to renounce it again. There they both were, blissful, useless, a prey to a public happiness, depending on one another as much as offer and acceptance do. They remained suspended by a single thread above the pit dug by themselves, and they rejoiced in their danger. What was to be done now with their victory? Save when they dressed (and in the peculiar vagrancy of dreams) they never knew a moment's solitude. There was nothing unexpected or thrilling between them, nor any room for jealousy. They belonged to each other in the most difficult of all lighting: that of happiness. As though that were not enough they chose to leave the West and to go to Greece. II "I COME from L---- one of the northern Sporades. No, it is too small, you will only find it on German maps. I've got a marble cottage there. Don't be alarmed. It is deserted. Nobody will call on us." They had embarked at the Galata bridge the day before, on leaving the train. A forbidding rain-swept landscape. The cupolas of the mosques were like big water-logged balloons which were unable to rise; every year the Pera sky-scrapers increase in number and add to the general depression; the river steamboats belch out clouds of Heraklian coal which grits between one's teeth, and dreary Scythian mists creep up from the Black Sea along the leaden Bosphorous. The driving rain soaked the houses of Scutari, turning their silver grey wood black. "In Turkey," said Irene, "it always rains." "I suppose if the Greeks had come back to Constantinople the weather would have changed completely." Lewis tried to tease her, but she refused to see any humour in it, concentrating in herself the undying hatred of Greek for Turk. "You French people, with your literary flirtations with Turkey and your blindness to her infidelities, are quite intolerable. Haven't you understood the lesson of the war?" And Irene pointed with her finger to the _Goeben_, a worn-out, unkempt hulk, but alive once more in front of the Old Seraglio. "But I'm not standing up for the Turks." "Yes, you are." "I'm not." Irene heaved "one of those Greek sighs that make the Bosphorous tremble," as Byron says.