will entirely consume the dry."

She continued to study the ancient painting. Her fingers were playing
with the ends of her lace veil.

"Besides," he went on, "if I had been in love a dozen times, it wouldn't
signify. For I should have been in love with ordinary usual human
women. They're the only sort I ever met--till I met her. She's of a
totally different order--as distinct from them as ... What shall
I say? Oh, as unlike them as starfire is unlike dull clay.
Starfire--starfire--the wonderful, high, white-burning starfire of her
spirit, that's the thing that strikes you most in her. It shines through
her. It shines in her eyes, it shines in her hair, her adorable, soft,
dark, warm and fragrant hair; it shines in her very voice; it shines in
every word she utters, even in the unkindest."

"Dear me! what an alarmingly refulgent person you depict!" laughed Maria
Dolores, her eyes still on the wall.

"I have no gift for word-painting," said John; "though I doubt if the
words are yet invented that could fitly paint my lady. She grows in
beauty day by day. It's a literal fact--every fresh time I see her, she
is perceptibly more lovely than the last, more love-compelling in her
loveliness. But 'tis a thing unpaintable, indescribable, as
indescribable as the perfume of a rose. Oh, why haven't I five thousand
a year?"

"You harp so persistently upon your desire for money," suggested Maria
Dolores, "one might infer she was a commodity, to be bought and sold.
You begin at the wrong end. What good would five or fifty thousand a