"A treacle well--"

* * * * *

She went on with the Dormouse's Tale, but Ted, for once, hardly heard
her--his mind was too busy with its odd, Egyptological dream.

The princess who looked like Elinor. Her slaves would come first--a fat
bawling eunuch, all one black glisten like new patent-leather, striking
with a silver rod to clear dogs and crocodiles and Israelites out of the
way. Then the litter--and a flash between curtains blown aside for an
instant--and Hook Nose gazing and gazing--all the fine fighting curses of
David on the infidel, that he had muttered sourly under breath all day,
blowing away from him like sand from the face of a sphinx.

Pomp sounding in brass and cries all around the litter like the boasting
color of a trumpet--but in the litter not pomp but fineness passing.
Fineness of youth untouched, from the clear contrast of white skin and
crow-black hair to the hands that had the little stirrings of moon-moths
against the green robe. Fineness of mind that will not admit the
unescapable minor dirts of living, however much it may see them, a mind
temperate with reticence and gentleness, seeing not life itself but its own
delighted dream of it, a heart that had had few shocks as yet, and never
the ones that the heart must be mailed or masked to withstand. The thing
that passed had been continually sheltered, exquisitely guarded from the
stronger airs of life as priests might guard a lotus, and yet it was
neither tenderly unhealthy nor sumptuously weak. A lotus--that was it--and
Hook Nose stood looking at the lotus--and because it was innocent he filled
his eyes with it. And then it passed and its music went out of the mind.