Antony had laughed down Beatrice's fancies, yet all the time she had
been talking he was conscious that the idea she had suggested was
appealing to him with a perverse fascination.

To love, not the literal beloved, but the purified stainless image of
her,--surely this would be to ascend into the region of spiritual love,
a love unhampered and untainted by the earth.

As he said this to himself, his mind, ever pitilessly self-conscious,
knew it was but a subterfuge, a fine euphemism for a strange desire
which he had known was already growing within him; for when Beatrice had
spoken of his loving an image, it was no abstract passion he had
conceived, but some fanciful variation of earthly love--a love of
beauty centring itself upon some form midway between life and death,
inanimate and yet alive, human and yet removed from the accidents of
humanity.

To love an image with one's whole heart! If only one could achieve
that--and never come out of the dream.

These thoughts gave him a new desire to look again at the image. He felt
that in some way she would be changed, and he hastened up the wood in a
strange expectancy.




CHAPTER IV