in the later years, he would have met the dull misery of
disillusionment. Adelaide was a boy's sensational trophy. Her distant
beauty and color was the art and pigment of his own mind.

A soul rudiment, a mental bud, and a beautiful prophylactic body--such
was her equipment. He dreamed of her as a love flower of
inextinguishable sweetness. The mere abstraction of her sex,--colorless
enough to most grown men,--was a sort of miracle to the boy. He made it
shining with his idealism.... Frail arms held out to him; cool arms
that turned electric with fervor. Unashamed, she took him as her
own....

Exquisite devourer, yet she had much to do in bringing forth from the
latent, one of the rarest gifts a boy can have--lovelier than royalty
and fine as genius--the blue flower of fastidiousness. Adelaide, all
unconcerned, identified herself with this, and it lived in the
foreground of his mind. She became his Southland, his isle of the sea.
Winds from the South were her kisses--almost all the kisses he knew for
years afterward. Living women were less to him than her memory. Facing
the South, through many a hot-breathed night, he saw her--and the
little house.... And what a drowsy-head she was! Nothing to do with the
morning light, had she, save when it awakened, to shut it out
impatiently, and turn over to the dimmest of walls until afternoon. She
had never been truly alive until afternoon. How he had laughed at her
for that!... A creature of languors; a mere system of inert dejected
cells when alone, pure destructive principle, if you like,--yet she
held this boy's heart to her, without a letter, possibly with little or
no thought of him, across a thousand leagues of sea--and this, through
those frequently ungovernable years in which so many men become thick
and despicable with excess.