the
answer in my mind, but she admitted that she had previously had no
distinct impression on those points. On the other hand, if in the
blackest midnight I should come to her, she would not need to ask who
the comer was. It is by the mind, not the eye, that these people know
one another. It is really only in their relations to soulless and
inanimate things that they need eyes at all.

It must not be supposed that their disregard of one another's bodily
aspect grows out of any ascetic sentiment. It is merely a necessary
consequence of their power of directly apprehending mind, that whenever
mind is closely associated with matter the latter is comparatively
neglected on account of the greater interest of the former, suffering as
lesser things always do when placed in immediate contrast with greater.
Art is with them confined to the inanimate, the human form having, for
the reason mentioned, ceased to inspire the artist. It will be naturally
and quite correctly inferred that among such a race physical beauty is
not the important factor in human fortune and felicity that it elsewhere
is. The absolute openness of their minds and hearts to one another makes
their happiness far more dependent on the moral and mental qualities
of their companions than upon their physical. A genial temperament, a
wide-grasping, godlike intellect, a poet soul, are incomparably more
fascinating to them than the most dazzling combination conceivable of
mere bodily graces.

A woman of mind and heart has no more need of beauty to win love in
these islands than a beauty elsewhere of mind or heart. I should mention
here, perhaps, that this race, which makes so little account of physical
beauty, is itself a singularly handsome one. This is owing doubtless in
part to the absolute compatibility of temperaments in all the marriages,
and partly also to the reaction upon the body of a state of ideal mental
and moral health and placidity.

Not being myself a mind-reader, the fact that my love was rarely
beautiful in form and face had doubtless no little part in attracting my
devotion. This, of course, she knew, as she knew all my thoughts,
and, knowing my limitations, tolerated and forgave the element of
sensuousness in my passion. But if it must have seemed to her so little
worthy in comparison with the high spiritual communion which her race
know as love, to me it became, by virtue of her almost superhuman
relation to me, an ecstasy more ravishing surel