with a hook from a
bundle of like pieces. A bundle of bones instead of Demeter's golden
sheaf! Her sitting room at the Brook Green lodging house was soon a
reflection of her mind, the walls covered with musical instruments, pieces
of oriental drapery, and Egyptian gods and goddesses painted by herself in
the British Museum.

V

Presently a hansom drove up to our door at Bedford Park with Miss Maud
Gonne, who brought an introduction to my father from old John O'Leary, the
Fenian leader. She vexed my father by praise of war, war for its own sake,
not as the creator of certain virtues but as if there were some virtue in
excitement itself. I supported her against my father, which vexed him the
more, though he might have understood that, apart from the fact that
Carolus Duran and Bastien-Lepage were somehow involved, a man so young as
I could not have differed from a woman so beautiful and so young. To-day,
with her great height and the unchangeable lineaments of her form, she
looks the Sybil I would have had played by Florence Farr, but in that day
she seemed a classical impersonation of the Spring, the Virgilian
commendation "She walks like a goddess" made for her alone. Her complexion
was luminous, like that of apple blossom through which the light falls,
and I remember her standing that first day by a great heap of such
blossoms in the window. In the next few years I saw her always when she
passed to and fro between Dublin and Paris, surrounded, no matter how
rapid her journey and how brief her stay at either end of it, by cages
full of birds, canaries, finches of all kinds, dogs, a parrot, and once a
full-grown hawk from Donegal. Once when I saw her to her railway carriage
I noticed how the cages obstructed wraps and cushions and wondered what
her fellow travellers would say, but the carriage remained empty. It was
years before I could see into the mind that lay hidden under so much
beauty and so much energy.

VI

Some quarter of an hour's walk from Bedford Park, out on the high road to
Richmond, lived W. E. Henley, and I, like many others, began under him my
education. His portrait, a lithograph by Rothenstein, hangs over my
mantelpiece among portraits of other friends. He is drawn standing, but
because doubtless of his crippled legs he leans forward, resting his
elbows upon some slightly suggested object--a table or a window-sill. His
heavy figure and powerful head, the disordered hair standing upright, his