pancy of most of the rest, and the
fiendish malice of the painter, Lutwyche, who has a grudge against
Jules, because Jules (he has been told) had described him and his
intimates as "dissolute, brutalised, heartless bunglers." Very soon
after the bridal pair shall have alighted and gone in (so Lutwyche tells
Gottlieb), something remarkable will happen; it is this which they are
awaiting--Lutwyche, as the moving spirit, close under the window of the
studio, that he may lose no word of the anticipated drama. But they must
all keep well within call; everybody may be needed.

At noon the married pair arrive--the bridegroom radiant, his hair "half
in storm and half in calm--patted down over the left temple--like a
frothy cup one blows on to cool it; and the same old blouse that he
murders the marble in."[52:1] The bride is--"how magnificently pale!"
Most of these young men have seen her before, and always it has been her
pallor which has struck them, as it struck Pippa on seeing her alight at
Asolo. She is a Greek girl from Malamocco,[52:2] fourteen years old at
most, "white and quiet as an apparition," with "hair like sea-moss"; her
name is Phene, which, as Lutwyche explains, means sea-eagle. . . . "How
magnificently pale"--and how Jules gazes on her! To Gottlieb that gaze
of the young, rapturous husband is torture. "Pity--pity!" he
exclaims--but he alone of them all is moved to this: Schramm, ever ready
with his theories of mysticism and beauty and the immortal idealism of
the soul, is unconcerned with practice--theories and his pipe bound all
for Schramm; while Lutwyche is close-set as any predatory beast upon his
prey; and the rank and file are but the foolish, heartless boys of all
time, all place, the "students," mere and transient, who may turn into
decent men as they grow older.

Well, they pass in, the bridegroom and his snowflake bride, and we pass
in with them--but not, like them, forget the group that lurked and
loitered about the house as they arrived.

+ + + + +

The girl is silent as she is pale, and she is so pale that the first
words her husband speaks are as the utterance of a fear awakened by her
aspect--

"Do not die, Phene! I am yours now, you
Are mine now; let fate reach me how she likes,
If you'll not die: so, never die!"

He leads her to the one seat in his workroom, then bends over her in
worshipping love, while she, still speechless, lifts her whit