ance from both. As with men and women,
the whole person expressed a latent sensuality, which gave body and face
alike their peculiar character.... Maskull decided that it was love--but
what love--love for whom? it was neither the shame-carrying passion of
a male, nor the deep-rooted instinct of a female to obey her destiny. It
was as real and irresistible as these, but quite different.

As he continued staring into those strange, archaic eyes, he had an
intuitive feeling that her lover was no other than Shaping himself. It
came to him that the design of this love was not the continuance of the
race but the immortality on earth of the individual. No children were
produced by the act; the lover aerself was the eternal child. Further,
ae sought like a man, but received like a woman. All these things were
dimly and confusedly expressed by this extraordinary being, who seemed
to have dropped out of another age, when creation was different.

Of all the weird personalities Maskull had so far met in Tormance, this
one struck him as infinitely the most foreign--that is, the farthest
removed from him in spiritual structure. If they were to live together
for a hundred years, they could never be companions.

Maskull pulled himself out of his trancelike meditations and, viewing
the newcomer in greater detail, tried with his understanding to account
for the marvellous things told him by his intuitions. Ae possessed broad
shoulders and big bones, and was without female breasts, and so far ae
resembled a man. But the bones were so flat and angular that aer flesh
presented something of the character of a crystal, having plane surfaces
in place of curves. The body looked as if it had not been ground down
by the sea of ages into smooth and rounded regularity but had sprung
together in angles and facets as the result of a single, sudden idea.
The face too was broken and irregular. With his racial prejudices,
Maskull found little beauty in it, yet beauty there was, though neither
of a masculine nor of a feminine type, for it had the three essentials
of beauty: character, intelligence, and repose. The skin was
copper-coloured and strangely luminous, as if lighted from within. The
face was beardless, but the hair of the head was as long as a woman's,
and, dressed in a single plait, fell down behind as far as the ankles.
Ae possessed only two eyes. That part of the turban which went across
the forehead protruded so far in front that it eviden