propped his chin
and she thought, "Poor fellow, so much emotion for a little praise?"

"What did you mean by it?" she said.

He considered a moment--as who should say "What the dickens did I mean
by it?"

Lucia leaned back now, for the first time, in the breathing space he
gave her, attentively watching the man she proposed to make her
secretary; and as she watched him she found herself defending him
against her own criticism. If he dropped his aitches it was not
grossly as the illiterate do; she wouldn't go so far as to say he
_dropped_ them; he slipped them, slided them; it was no more than a
subtle slur, a delicate elision. And that only in the commoner words,
the current coin of his world. He was as right as possible, she
noticed, in all words whose acquaintance he had made on his own
account. And his voice--his voice pleaded against her prejudice with
all its lyric modulations. Much may be forgiven to such voices. And
there were other points in his favour.

Kitty was right. He was nice to look at. She was beginning to know the
changes of his face; she liked it best when, as now, its features
became suddenly subtle and serious and straight. At the moment his
eyes, almost opaque from the thickness of their blue, were dull under
the shadow of the eye-bone. But when he grew excited (as he frequently
did) they had a way of clearing suddenly, they flashed first colour at
you, then light, then fire. That was what they were doing now; for now
he let himself go.

His Helen, he said, was the eternal Beauty, the eternal Dream. Beauty
perpetually desirous of incarnation, perpetually unfaithful to flesh
and blood; the Dream that longs for the embrace of reality, that
wanders never satisfied till it finds a reality as immortal as itself.
Helen couldn't stay in the house of Theseus, or the house of Menelaus
or the house of Priam. Theseus was a fool if he thought he would take
her by force, and Paris was a fool if he thought he could keep her for
pleasure; and Menelaus was the biggest fool of all if he expected her
to bear him children and to mind his house. They all do violence to
the divinity in her, and she vindicates it by eluding them. Her
vengeance is the vengeance of an immortal made victim to mortality.
Helen of Argos and Troy is the Dream divorced from reality.

"Yes--yes. I see." She leaned back in her chair, fascinated, while the
wonderful voice went on, covering its own offences with exquisite
resonances and o