ion
of an unrealised world--a vision which had expanded and blossomed in
the luxuriant if slightly formal garden of her intellect. The world she
looked upon was a world, as Adams had once said, "seen through the haze
of a golden temperament"--the dream of an imaginative mysticism, of a
conventual purity, a dream which is to the reality as the soul of a man
is to the body. And it was this inspired divination, this luminous
idealism, which had caused Adams to exclaim when he put down her first
small gray volume: "Is it possible that we can still see visions?"

A little later, when he came to know her, he found that the vision she
looked upon had coloured not only her own soul, but even the outward
daily happenings of her life. For him she was from the first compacted
of divine mysteries, of exquisite surprises, and he loved to fancy that
he could see her genius burning like a clear flame within her and
shining at vivid moments with a still soft radiance in her face. He
always thought of her soul as of something luminous, and there were
instants when it seemed to touch her eyes and her mouth with an edge of
light. Beyond this her complexities remained for him as on the day when
he first saw her--if she was obscure it was the obscurity of a star seen
through a fog--and the desire to understand lost itself presently in the
bewilderment of his misapprehension. At last, however, he had put her,
as it were, tentatively aside, had relinquished his attempt to reduce
her to a formula with the despairing admission that she was, take her as
you would, a subtlety that compelled one to a mental effort. The effort
which he had up to this time associated with the society of women had
been of anything but a mental character. There was the effort of
putting one's best physical foot in advance, the effort of keeping one's
person conspicuously in evidence and one's intellect as unobtrusively in
abeyance--the material effort of appearing always in one's best
trousers, the moral effort of presenting always one's worst
intelligence. It had seemed to him until he met Laura--and his opinion
was the effect of a limited experience upon a large philosophic
ignorance--that the female sex played the part in Nature which is
performed by the chorus in a Greek tragedy--that it shrilly voiced the
horrors of the actual in the face of a divine indifference--and
strenuously insisted upon the importance of the eternal detail. From
Connie he had gathered that