rees;
her hair, black and curling, fell down her back, and she wore a wreath
of scented flowers. Her hands were lovely. They were so small, so
exquisitely formed, they gave your heart-strings a wrench. And in those
days she laughed easily. Her smile was so delightful that it made your
knees shake. Her skin was like a field of ripe corn on a summer day.
Good Heavens, how can I describe her? She was too beautiful to be real."

"And these two young things, she was sixteen and he was twenty, fell in
love with one another at first sight. That is the real love, not the
love that comes from sympathy, common interests, or intellectual
community, but love pure and simple. That is the love that Adam felt for
Eve when he awoke and found her in the garden gazing at him with dewy
eyes. That is the love that draws the beasts to one another, and the
Gods. That is the love that makes the world a miracle. That is the love
which gives life its pregnant meaning. You have never heard of the wise,
cynical French duke who said that with two lovers there is always one
who loves and one who lets himself be loved; it is a bitter truth to
which most of us have to resign ourselves; but now and then there are
two who love and two who let themselves be loved. Then one might fancy
that the sun stands still as it stood when Joshua prayed to the God of
Israel."

"And even now after all these years, when I think of these two, so
young, so fair, so simple, and of their love, I feel a pang. It tears my
heart just as my heart is torn when on certain nights I watch the full
moon shining on the lagoon from an unclouded sky. There is always pain
in the contemplation of perfect beauty."

"They were children. She was good and sweet and kind. I know nothing of
him, and I like to think that then at all events he was ingenuous and
frank. I like to think that his soul was as comely as his body. But I
daresay he had no more soul than the creatures of the woods and forests
who made pipes from reeds and bathed in the mountain streams when the
world was young, and you might catch sight of little fawns galloping
through the glade on the back of a bearded centaur. A soul is a
troublesome possession and when man developed it he lost the Garden of
Eden."

"Well, when Red came to the island it had recently been visited by one
of those epidemics which the white man has brought to the South Seas,
and one third of the inhabitants had died. It seems that the girl had
lost