of "Lohengrin," but the second was just beginning, and I gave myself up
to it with no more than a glance at the house. When it was over I
treated myself, with my glass, from my place in the stalls, to a general
survey of the boxes, making doubtless on their contents the reflections,
pointed by comparison, that are most familiar to the wanderer restored to
London. There was the common sprinkling of pretty women, but I suddenly
noted that one of these was far prettier than the others. This lady,
alone in one of the smaller receptacles of the grand tier and already the
aim of fifty tentative glasses, which she sustained with admirable
serenity, this single exquisite figure, placed in the quarter furthest
removed from my stall, was a person, I immediately felt, to cause one's
curiosity to linger. Dressed in white, with diamonds in her hair and
pearls on her neck, she had a pale radiance of beauty which even at that
distance made her a distinguished presence and, with the air that easily
attaches to lonely loveliness in public places, an agreeable mystery. A
mystery however she remained to me only for a minute after I had levelled
my glass at her: I feel to this moment the startled thrill, the shock
almost of joy, with which I translated her vague brightness into a
resurrection of Flora. I say a resurrection, because, to put it crudely,
I had on that last occasion left our young woman for dead. At present
perfectly alive again, she was altered only, as it were, by this fact of
life. A little older, a little quieter, a little finer and a good deal
fairer, she was simply transfigured by having recovered. Sustained by
the reflection that even her recovery wouldn't enable her to distinguish
me in the crowd, I was free to look at her well. Then it was it came
home to me that my vision of her in her great goggles had been cruelly
final. As her beauty was all there was of her, that machinery had
extinguished her, and so far as I had thought of her in the interval I
had thought of her as buried in the tomb her stern specialist had built.
With the sense that she had escaped from it came a lively wish to return