Philip really seemed to have been shaken by this conversation. Sylvia knew he had not finished his text, but he put everything aside in order not to keep her waiting; and before May was half-way through they had reached the island of Sirene. Here they stayed two months in a crumbling pension upon the cliff's edge until Sylvia was sun-dried without and within; she was enthralled by the evidences of imperial Rome, and her only regret was that she did not meet an eccentric Englishman who was reputed to have found, when digging a cistern, at least one of the lost books of Elephantis, which he read in olive-groves by the light of the moon. However, she met several other eccentrics of different nationalities and was pleased to find that Philip's humanism was, with Sirene as a background, strong enough to lend him an appearance of humanity. They planned, like all other visitors to Sirene, to build a big villa there; they listened like all other visitors to the Italian and foreign inhabitants' depreciation of every villa but the one in which they lived, either because they liked it or because they wanted to let it or because they wished new-comers to fall into snares laid for themselves when they were new-comers. At last they tore themselves from Sirenean dreams and schemes, chiefly because Sylvia had accepted an invitation to stay at Arbour End. They lingered for a while at Naples on the way home, where Sylvia looked about her with Petronian eyes, so much so, indeed, that a guide mistook what was merely academic curiosity for something more practical. It cost Philip fifty liras and nearly all the Italian he knew to get rid of the pertinacious and ingenious fellow. Arbour End had not changed at all in a year. Sylvia, when she thought of Green Lanes, laughed a little bitterly at herself (but not so bitterly as she would have laughed before the benevolent sunshine of Sirene) for ever supposing that she and Philip could create anything like it. Gladys and Enid, though they were now fifteen, had not yet lengthened their frocks; their mother could not yet bring herself to contemplate the disappearance of those slim black legs. "But we shall have to next term," Gladys said, "because Miss Ashley's written home about them." "And that stuck-up thing Gwendyr Jones said they were positively disgusting," Enid went on. "Yes," added Gladys, "and I told her they weren't half as disgusting as her ankles. And they aren't, are they, Sylvia?" "Some of the girls call her marrow-bones," said Enid. Sylvia would have preferred to avoid any intimate talks with Mrs. Worsley, but it was scarcely to be expected that she would succeed, and one night, looking ridiculously young with her fair hair hanging down her back, she came to Sylvia's bedroom, and sitting down at the end of her bed, began: "Well, are you glad you got married?" At any rate, Sylvia thought, she had the tact not to ask if she was glad she had taken her advice.