Jacob straightened himself slightly; for stability and balance affect the body first.

These statues annulled things so! He stared at them, then turned, and there was Madame Lucien Grave perched on a block of marble with her kodak pointed at his head.

Of course she jumped down, in spite of her age, her figure, and her tight boots--having, now that her daughter was married, lapsed with a luxurious abandonment, grand enough in its way, into the fleshy grotesque; she jumped down, but not before Jacob had seen her.
"Damn these women--damn these women!" he thought.

And he went to fetch his book which he had left lying on the ground in the Parthenon.
"How they spoil things," he murmured, leaning against one of the pillars, pressing his book tight between his arm and his side.

(As for the weather, no doubt the storm would break soon; Athens was under cloud.) "It is those damned women," said Jacob, without any trace of bitterness, but rather with sadness and disappointment that what might have been should never be.
(This violent disillusionment is generally to be expected in young men in the prime of life, sound of wind and limb, who will soon become fathers of families and directors of banks.) Then, making sure that the Frenchwomen had gone, and looking cautiously round him, Jacob strolled over to the Erechtheum and looked rather furtively at the goddess on the left-hand side holding the roof on her head.