At that last thought his mind flew back to the past evening, and was a
second time disturbed in its reveries by the entrance of Clodius. It
was a proof how much a single evening had sufficed to increase and to
refine the love of the Athenian for Ione, that whereas he had confided
to Clodius the secret of his first interview with her, and the effect it
had produced on him, he now felt an invincible aversion even to mention
to him her name. He had seen Ione, bright, pure, unsullied, in the
midst of the gayest and most profligate gallants of Pompeii, charming
rather than awing the boldest into respect, and changing the very nature
of the most sensual and the least ideal--as by her intellectual and
refining spells she reversed the fable of Circe, and converted the
animals into men. They who could not understand her soul were made
spiritual, as it were, by the magic of her beauty--they who had no heart
for poetry had ears, at least, for the melody of her voice. Seeing her
thus surrounded, purifying and brightening all things with her presence,
Glaucus almost for the first time felt the nobleness of his own
nature--he felt how unworthy of the goddess of his dreams had been his
companions and his pursuits. A veil seemed lifted from his eyes; he saw
that immeasurable distance between himself and his associates which the
deceiving mists of pleasure had hitherto concealed; he was refined by a
sense of his courage in aspiring to Ione. He felt that henceforth it
was his destiny to look upward and to soar. He could no longer breathe
that name, which sounded to the sense of his ardent fancy as something
sacred and divine, to lewd and vulgar ears. She was no longer the
beautiful girl once seen and passionately remembered--she was already
the mistress, the divinity of his soul. This feeling who has not
experienced?--If thou hast not, then thou hast never loved.

When Clodius therefore spoke to him in affected transport of the beauty