Excerpt from A Man of Athens

Everywhere was the sense of light, golden in the open spaces, deep, transparently blue in the shadows, vibrating and quivering through the cloudless blue of the sky, and blurring the soft purple of the hills, where their long, sweeping slopes touched the horizon.

An open carriage was mounting the slope toward the Acropolis, through the low pines and the clumps of gray-green aloes, and Theodora Douka, who had not been in Athens for nine years, leaned eagerly out.

At a bend of the up-curving road, she started to her feet, pointing high above her head, "Uncle! Costa! Polymnia! Look! Look at the columns of the Propylæa! Look how they stand out against the sky! Look at the color of it! Oh, I had forgotten that blue could be so bluet"

Her uncle caught hold of her arm. "My child! You will be falling out! Sit down! See, we are nearly there."

But as he pulled her down beside him, he kept his hand over hers, and smiled very tenderly at her enthusiasm, with a curious little uplifting of his gray mustache: for Aristidi Manelli, professor of history at the University of Athens, a special authority on ancient Egyptian history, understood all enthusiasms. In years he was sixty-five, in heart and suppleness of mind, not a day over thirty.

Theodora looked up into his face. "What a splendid idea you had, my uncle, to ask me to Athens now! If only father could be here too! You all, who live here, cannot understand how good it feels to be back."

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