Est doux comme un rayon de l'aube sur la neige.

Quand un souffle furtif glisse en ses cheveux blonds,
Une cendre ineffable inonde son épaule,
Et, de leur transparence argentant leurs cils longs,
Ses yeux out la couleur des belle nuits du pôle.

Et le gardien pensif du mystique oranger
Des balcons de l'Aurore eternelle se penche,
Et regarde passer ce fantôme léger
Dans les plis de sa robe immortellement blanche.

"Immortellement blanche!" Very white indeed!... Read the intimate
journal of Elsie Lindtner, written precisely by the side of one of these
fresh Northern lakes. Possibly at eighteen Elsie Lindtner may have
played at "Epiphanies" and filled "the pensive guardian of the mystic
orange tree" with admiration. But it is at forty-two that she begins to
edit her private diary, and her eyes that "match the hue of polar
nights" have seen a good deal in the course of those twenty years. And
if in the eyes of the law she has remained strictly faithful to her
marriage vows, she has judged herself in the secret depths of her heart.
She has also judged other women, her friends and confidants. The moment
of "the crisis" arrives, and, taking refuge in "a savage solitude," in
which even the sight of a male servant is hateful to her, she sets down
with disconcerting lucidity all she has observed in other women, and in
herself. These other women are also of the North: Lillie Rothe, Agatha
Ussing, Astrid Bagge, Margarethe Ernst, Magna Wellmann.... Her memory
invokes them all, and they reappear. We seem to take part in a strange,
painful revel; a witches' revel of ardent yet withered sorceresses; a
revel in which the modern demons of Neurasthenia and Hysteria sport and