for her father to be made a baronet. She was wearing walking-boots and
a hat and a low-necked evening dress; for a painter was but just now
painting her portrait and neither she nor the painter saw anything odd
in the strange combination. She did not notice the roar of the
dragon's golden scales, nor distinguish above the manifold lights of
London the small, red glare of his eyes. He suddenly lifted his head,
a blaze of gold, over the balcony; he did not appear a yellow dragon
then, for his glistening scales reflected the beauty that London puts
upon her only at evening and night. She screamed, but to no knight,
nor knew what knight to call on, nor guessed where were the dragons'
overthrowers of far, romantic days, nor what mightier game they
chased, or what wars they waged; perchance they were busy even then
arming for Armageddon.

Out of the balcony of her father's house in Prince of Wales' Square,
the painted dark-green balcony that grew blacker every year, the
dragon lifted Miss Cubbidge and spread his rattling wings, and London
fell away like an old fashion. And England fell away, and the smoke of
its factories, and the round material world that goes humming round
the sun vexed and pursued by time, until there appeared the eternal
and ancient lands of Romance lying low by mystical seas.

You had not pictured Miss Cubbidge stroking the golden head of one of
the dragons of song with one hand idly, while with the other she
sometimes played with pearls brought up from lonely places of the sea.
They filled huge haliotis shells with pearls and laid them there
beside her, they brought her emeralds which she set to flash among the
tresses of her long black hair, they brought her threaded sapphires
for her cloak: all this the princes of fable did and the elves and the
gnomes of myth. And partly she still lived, and partly she was one
with long-ago and with those sacred tales that nurses tell, when all
their children are good, and evening has come, and the fire is burning
well, and the soft pat-pat of the snowflakes on the pane is like the
furtive tread of fearful things in old, enchanted woods. If at first
she missed those dainty novelties among which she was reared, the old,
sufficient song of the mystical sea singing of faery lore at first
soothed and at last consoled her. Even, she forgot those
advertisements of pills that are so dear to England; even, she forgot
political cant and the things that one discusses and the