His wife refused to comment, but very briefly touched her pearls. Since arriving in the city several hours earlier Maro Hajistavrou had been feeling a little ashamed of the pearls.

‘You have never liked my friends the Alexious,’ she began again, high and querulous. ‘Never for a moment, Spiro.’

‘Ba!’ He almost spat a second time, but lapsed instead into his rejected native tongue. ‘Who am I to crab somebody we haven’t even met?’

It was partly true. She had not met Aleko Alexiou.

‘But Kikitsa!’

Dry at the best of times, Maro droned against the dust. Sensing her husband to be afraid of the Alexious made her even drier. That she was afraid of Kititsa’s husband she thought Spiro did not know.

‘Your fine friends are your own affair,’ Spiro mumbled above their footsteps.

That they should approach important issues along class levels was something he took for granted.

‘My fine friends?’ Maro cried piteously. ‘They are poor, I gather. And intellectual.’

‘Intellectuals!’ Spiro said, arranging what she knew from behind must be his monogrammed handkerchief. ‘I know no intellectuals,’ he said, ‘but soon shall. Unless they have gone to the sea.’

Maro Hajistavrou, in her irritation, did not pay attention enough, and almost tripped on the uneven paving.

‘Oh, but Kikitsa is not a bit like what you persist in thinking she is,’ she recovered herself and babbled. ‘She is not at all dreary. If anything I was the uninteresting one.’

When anybody roused her stubbornness, her loyalty became excessive. If only she could have invoked the past, and allowed it to reflect her shining friend. But in the heat of the street she could not have conveyed its virtues, like a spring of mountain water, at which two girls had knelt to plunge their cupped hands.

‘It is no use, I see,’ she muttered.

Impatience brought her level, and for a moment he put his arm through hers, and she felt its thickness, its rubbery solidity. Then she let fall one of those little grudging smiles which was always her final answer to anyone’s implied criticism of her husband.

But would Kikitsa Alexiou recognize that it was more than a material necessity which had forced Maro Mauroleondos into marriage with a common Peloponnesian restaurateur?

For several months after landing in New York the thin girl had continued to measure, not so much after the standards of her Aunt Cecaumenou, so adept at bullying Americans into not following their own taste, but according to those vaguer, hence more desirable, even when agonizing, standards of Kikitsa Andragona.

Kikitsa had written regularly at first.

Dearest Maro,

I wonder, and pity! All those Americans! How do they react? And the Aunt Cecaumenou, whose nails break from central heat! Perhaps when it is autumn I shall write a novel. Just at present I am quite spasmodic – suffering from too much summer. How I would love to make love on marble, beside the rose-coloured ramparts, under a pomegranate tree, looking seawards. ...