A few wild weeks of happiness cut short by a hideous,
treacherous crime. Months of voiceless agony, and then
a child born in pain. The mother snatched away by death,
the boy left to solitude and the tyranny of an old and
loveless man. Yes; it was an interesting background.
It posed the lad, made him more perfect, as it were. Behind every
exquisite thing that existed, there was something tragic.
Worlds had to be in travail, that the meanest flower might blow.
. . . And how charming he had been at dinner the night before,
as with startled eyes and lips parted in frightened pleasure
he had sat opposite to him at the club, the red candleshades
staining to a richer rose the wakening wonder of his face.
Talking to him was like playing upon an exquisite violin.
He answered to every touch and thrill of the bow. . . . There
was something terribly enthralling in the exercise of influence.
No other activity was like it. To project one's soul into some
gracious form, and let it tarry there for a moment; to hear one's
own intellectual views echoed back to one with all the added
music of passion and youth; to convey one's temperament into
another as though it were a subtle fluid or a strange perfume:
there was a real joy in that--perhaps the most satisfying
joy left to us in an age so limited and vulgar as our own,
an age grossly carnal in its pleasures, and grossly common
in its aims.... He was a marvellous type, too, this lad,
whom by so curious a chance he had met in Basil's studio,
or could be fashioned into a marvellous type, at any rate.
Grace was his, and the white purity of boyhood, and beauty such
as old Greek marbles kept for us. There was nothing that one
could not do with him. He could be made a Titan or a toy.
What a pity it was that such beauty was destined to fade!