You mustn't suppose it to be mere mysticism."

Linda said, "Very well, I won't."

He nodded. "No one could call Michelangelo hysterical. Sometime in
the history of man, of a salt solution, this divinity has touched
them. Touched them hopefully, and perhaps gone--banished by the
other destination. Or I can comprehend nature killing it relentlessly,
since it didn't lead to propagation. Then, too, as much as was useful
was turned into a dogma for politics and priests.

"You saw in the rushlight a woman against the arras; there was a
humming of viola d'amore from the musicians' balcony; she smiled at
you, lingering, and then vanished with a whisper of brocade de Lyons
on a sanded floor. Nothing else but a soft white glove, eternally
fragrant, in your habergeon, an eternally fragrant memory; the dim
vision in stone street and coppice; a word, a message, it might be,
sent across the world of steel at death. And then, in the last
flicker of vision, the arras and the clear insistent strings, the
whispering brocade de Lyons on the landing.

"The philosophy of it," he said in a different tone, "is exact, even
a scientific truth. But men have been more concerned with turning
lead into gold; naturally the spirit has been neglected. The science
of love has been incredibly soiled:

"The old gesture toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, the
escape from the fatality of flesh. Yet it was a service of the body
made incredibly lovely in actuality and still never to be grasped.
Never to be won. It ought to be clear to you that realized it would