e Pope entering
the Vatican is the crowd's creation. Her beauty, backed by her great
stature, could instantly affect an assembly, and not as often with our
stage beauties because obvious and florid, for it was incredibly
distinguished, and if--as must be that it might seem that assembly's very
self, fused, unified, and solitary--her face, like the face of some Greek
statue, showed little thought, her whole body seemed a master work of long
labouring thought, as though a Scopas had measured and calculated,
consorted with Egyptian sages, and mathematicians out of Babylon, that he
might outface even Artemisia's sepulchral image with a living norm.

But in that ancient civilization abstract thought scarce existed, while
she but rose partially and for a moment out of raging abstraction; and for
that reason, as I have known another woman do, she hated her own beauty,
not its effect upon others, but its image in the mirror. Beauty is from
the antithetical self, and a woman can scarce but hate it, for not only
does it demand a painful daily service, but it calls for the denial or the
dissolution of the self.

"How many centuries spent
The sedentary soul,
In toil of measurement
Beyond eagle or mole
Beyond hearing and seeing
Or Archimedes' guess,
To raise into being
That loveliness?"

V

On the morning of the great procession, the greatest in living memory, the
Parnellite and Anti-Parnellite members of Parliament, huddled together
like cows in a storm, gather behind our carriage, and I hear John Redmond
say to certain of his late enemies, "I went up nearer the head of the
Procession, but one of the Marshals said, 'This is not your place, Mr
Redmond; your place is further back.' 'No,' I said, 'I will stay here.'
'In that case,' he said, 'I will lead you back.'" Later on I can see by
the pushing and shouldering of a delegate from South Africa how important
place and procedure is; and noticing that Maud Gonne is cheered
everywhere, and that the Irish Members march through street after street
without welcome, I wonder if their enemies have not intended their
humiliation.

* * * * *

We are at the Mansion House Banquet, and John Dillon is making the first
speech he has made before a popular Dublin audience since the death of
Parnell; and I have several times to keep my London delegates from
interrupting. Dillon is very nervous, and as I watch him the abstract
passion begins