u trust me."

She sat down without speaking, and he sat beside her.

"Viola," he said, "there are many men who love only what they can see,
and never think of the spirit behind it. They care only for a woman's
body. For them the woman's body is the woman. I put it rather brutally.
What they can touch, what they can kiss, what they can hold in their
arms is all to them. They are unconscious of the distant, untameable
woman, the lawless woman who may be free in the body that is captive,
who may be unknown in the body that is familiar, who may even be pure in
the body that is defiled as she is immortal though her body is mortal.
These men love the flesh only. But there are at least some men who love
the spirit. They love the flesh, too, because it manifests the spirit,
but to them the spirit is the real thing. They are always stretching out
their arms to that. The hearth can't satisfy them. They demand the fire.
The fire, the fire!" he repeated, as if the word warmed him. "I've so
often thought of this, imagined this. It's as if I'd actually foreseen
it."

He spoke with gathering excitement.

"What?" she murmured.

"That some day the woman men--those men I've spoken of--loved would
be struck down, and the real woman, the woman of the true beauty, the
mystic, the spirit woman, would be set free. If this had not happened
you could perhaps never have known who was the man that really loved
you--that loved the real you, the you that lies so far beyond the flesh,
the you that has sung and suffered--"

"Ah, suffered!" she said.

But there was a note of something that was not sorrow in her voice.

"If you want to know the man I mean," Robin said, "lift up your veil,
Viola."

She sat quite still for a moment, a moment that seemed very long. Then
she put up both hands to her head, untied the veil and let it fall into
her lap. He looked at her, and there was silence. They heard the bees
humming. There were many among the roses on the wall. She had turned her
face fully towards him, but she kept her eyes on the veil that lay in
her lap. It was covered with little raised black spots. She began to
count them. As the number mounted she felt her body turning gradually
cold.

"Fifteen--sixteen-seventeen"--she formed the words with her
lips, striving to concentrate her whole soul upon this useless
triviality--"eighteen--nineteen--twenty."

Little drops of moisture came out upon her temples. Still the silence
continued. She k