He interrupted her: "Lys, dear friend, you must not bore Miss Adams with
my theories of art and life. _She_ has read me--"

Ermentrude gave him a grateful glance. He seemed, despite his
self-consciousness, a great man--how great she could not exactly define.
His eyes--two black diamonds full of golden reflections, the eyes of a
conqueror, a seer--began to burn little bright spots into her
consciousness, and, selfishly, she admitted, she wished the two women
would go away and leave her to interrogate her idol in peace. There were
so many things to ask him, so many difficult passages in The Golden
Glaze and Hesitations, above all in that great dramatic poem, The
Voices, which she had witnessed in Paris, with its mystic atmosphere of
pity and terror. She would never forget her complex feelings, when at a
Paris theatre, she saw slowly file before her in a Dream-Masque the
wraith-like figures of the poet, their voices their only corporeal gift.
Picture had dissolved into picture, and in the vapours of these crooning
enchantments she heard voices of various timbres enunciating in
monosyllables the wisdom of the ages, the poetry of the future. This
play was, for her, and for Paris, too, the last word in dramatic art,
the supreme _nuance_ of beauty. Everything had been accomplished:
Shakespeare, Molière, Ibsen; yet here was a new evocation, a fresh peep
at untrodden paths. In bliss that almost dissolved her being, the
emotional American girl reached her hotel, where she tried to sleep.
When her aunt told her of the invitation tendered by the princess, a
rare one socially, she was in the ninth heaven of the Swedenborgians.
Any place to meet Octave Kéroulan!

And now he sat near her signalling, she knew, her sympathies, and as the
fates would have it two dragons, her aunt and his wife, guarded the