When Tamara woke in the morning the recollection of her camel ride seemed like a dream. She sat for a long time at the window of her room looking out toward the green world and Cairo. She was trying to adjust things in her mind. This stranger had certainly produced an effect upon her.
She wondered who he was, and how he would look in daylight--and above all whither he had galloped into the desert. Then she wondered at herself. The whole thing was so out of her line--so bizarre--in a life of carefully balanced proprieties. And were the thoughts the Sphinx had awaked in her brain true? Yes, certainly she had been ruled by others always--and had never developed her own soul.
She was very sensitive--that last whimsical smile of the unknown had humiliated her. She felt he had laughed at her prim propriety in wishing to get rid of him before the gate. Indeed, she suddenly felt he might laugh at a good many of the things she did. And this ruffled her serenity. She put up her slender hands and pushed the thick hair back from her forehead with an impatient gesture. It all made her dissatisfied with herself and full of unrest.
"You don't tell me a thing about your Sphinx excursion last night, Tamara," Millicent Hardcastle said at breakfast, rather peevishly. They were sipping coffee together in the latter's room in dressing-gowns. "Was it nice, and had the tourists quite departed?"
"It was wonderful!" and Tamara leant back and looked into distance. "There were no tourists, and it made me think a number of new things--we seem such ordinary people, Millicent."
Mrs. Hardcastle glanced up surprised, not to say offended, with coffee cup poised in the air.
"Yes--you may wonder, but it is true, Milly--we do the same things every day, and think the same thoughts, and are just thoroughly commonplace and uninteresting."
"And you came to these conclusions from gazing at the Sphinx?" Mrs. Hardcastle asked.
"Yes," said Tamara, the pink deepening for a moment in her cheeks. In her whole life she hardly ever had had a secret. "I sat there, Millicent, in the sand opposite the strange image, and it seemed to smile and mock at all little things; it appeared perfectly ridiculous that we pay so much attention to what the world says or thinks. I could not help looking back to the time when you and I were at Dresden together. What dull lives we have both led since! Yours perhaps more filled than mine has been, because you have children; but really we have both been browsing like sheep."