vertones.

"This divorce is the cause of all the evil that can happen to men and
women. Because of it Helen becomes an instrument in the hands of
Aphrodite--Venus Genetrix--do you see? She's the marriage-breaker, the
destroyer of men. She brings war and pestilence and death. She is the
supreme illusion. But _Helen in Leuce_ is the true Helen. In Leuce,
you know, she appears as she is, in her divine form, freed from the
tyranny of perpetual incarnation. I can't explain it, but that's the
idea. Don't you see how the chorus in praise of Aphrodite breaks off
into a prayer for deliverance from her? And at the end I make Athene
bring Helen to Achilles, who was her enemy in Troy.--That's part of
the idea, too."

"And Achilles?"

"Achilles is strength, virility, indestructible _will_."

It seemed that while trivial excitement corrupted, intense feeling
purified his speech, and as he pronounced these words every accent was
irreproachable. A lyric exaltation seemed to have seized him as it had
seized him in the reading of Sophocles.

"The idea is reconciliation, the wedding of the Dream to reality. I
haven't made up my mind whether the last chorus will be the
Epithalamium or the Hymn to Pallas Athene."

He paused for reflection, and in reflection the lyric rapture died.
He added pensively. "The 'Ymn, I think."

Lucia averted her ardent gaze before the horror in his young blue
eyes. They were the eyes of some wild winged creature dashed down from
its soaring and frenzied by the fall. Lucia could have wept for him.

"Then this," said she, feigning an uninterrupted absorption in the
manuscript, "this is not what my cousin saw?"

"No, h--he only saw the first draft of the two first Acts. It was
horribly stiff and cold. He said it was classical; I don't know what
he'd say it is now. I began it that way, and it finished itself this
way, and then I re-wrote the beginning."

"I see. I see. Something happened to you." As she spoke she still kept
her eyes fixed on the manuscript, as if she were only reading what was
written there. "You woke up--in the middle of the second Act, wasn't
it?--and came to life. You heard the world--the real world--calling to
you, and Helen and Achilles and all the rest of them turned to flesh
and blood on your hands."

"Yes," he said, "they were only symbols and I'd no notion what they
meant till they left off meaning it."

She looked from the manuscript to him. "You know in your heart you
_must