of some shining sorrow, a
quality which gave her face much arresting interest. It seemed one
great, rich tear. One loved to dwell upon it as upon those intense
stretches of evening sky when the day yearns through half-shut eyelids
in the west. One continually wondered what story it meant, for some it
must mean.

Watching her thus quietly, day by day, it seemed to me that as the weeks
from her first coming went by, this sadness deepened; and I could not
forbear one day questioning the elder Hesperides about her, thus
bringing upon myself a revelation I had little expected. For, said she,
'she was glad I had spoken to her, for she had long wished to ask me to
use my influence with my friend, that he might cease paying Hesper
attentions which he could not mean in earnest, but which she knew were
already causing Hesper to be fond of him. Having become friendly with
her, she had found out her secret and remonstrated with her, with the
result that she had avoided Narcissus for some time, but not without
much misery to herself, over which she was continually brooding.'

All this was an utter surprise, and a saddening one; for I had grown to
feel much interest in the girl, and had been especially pleased by all
absence of the flighty tendencies with which too many girls in public
service tempt men to their own destruction. She had seemed to me to bear
herself with a maidenly self-respect that spoke of no little grace of
breeding. She had two very strong claims on one's regard. She was
evidently a woman, in the deep, tragic sense of that word, and a lady in
the only true sense of that. The thought of a life so rich in womanly
promise becoming but another of the idle playthings of Narcissus filled
me with something akin to rage, and I was not long in saying some strong
words to him. Not that I feared for her the coarse 'ruin' the world
alone thinks of. Is that the worst that can befall woman? What of the
spiritual deflowering, of which the bodily is but a symbol? If the first
fine bloom of the soul has gone, if the dream that is only dreamed once
has grown up in the imagination and been once given, the mere chastity
of the body is a lie, and whatever its fecundity, the soul has nought
but sterility to give to another. It is not those kisses of the
lips--kisses that one forgets as one forgets the roses we smelt last
year--which profane; they but soil the vessel of the sacrament, and it
is the sacrament itself which those consumin