the
true Helen, who, according to the legend, never quitted Greece,
contemplated her own phantom within the walls of Troy--and be satisfied
that she is "best" of all. "All alike are wanting in one grace which
Fifine possesses: that of self-effacement. Helen and Cleopatra demand
unquestioning homage for their own mental as well as bodily charms; the
saint demands it for the principle she sets forth. His love demands that
he shall see into her heart; his wife that he shall believe the
impossible as regards her own powers of devotion. Fifine says,'You come
to look at my outside, my foreign face and figure my outlandish limbs.
Pay for the sight if it has pleased you, and give me credit for nothing
beyond what you see.' So simply honest an appeal must touch his heart."

Don Juan well knows what his wife thinks of all this, and he says it for
her. "Fifine attracts him for no such out of the way reason. Her charm
is that she is something new, and something which does not belong to
him. He is the soul of inconstancy; and if he had the sun for his own,
he would hanker after other light, were it that of a tallow-candle or a
squib." But he assures her that this reasoning is unsound, and his
amusing himself with a lower thing does not prove that he has become
indifferent to the higher. He shows this by reminding her of a picture
of Raphael's, which he was mad to possess; which now that he possesses
it, he often neglects for a picture-book of Dore's; but which, if
threatened with destruction, he would save at the sacrifice of a million
Dores, perhaps of his own life. And now he turns back to her phantom
self, as present in his own mind; describes it in terms of exquisite
grace and purity; and declares hers the one face which fits into his
heart, and makes whole what would be half without it.

Elvire is conciliated; but her husband will not leave well alone. He has
established her full claim to his admiration: but he is going to prove
that so far as her physical charms are concerned, she owes it to his
very attachment: "for those charms are not attested by her
looking-glass. He discovers them by the eye of love--in other words--by
the artist soul within him."

All beauty, Don Juan farther explains, is in the imagination of him who
feels it, be he lover or artist; be the beauty he descries the attribute
of a living face, of a portrait, or of some special arrangement of
sound. The feeling is inspired by its outward objects, but it c