ills, entangling her loose-flung
hair with Bacchic tendril and blossom, and drinking, in the passage
through Cully, more wine, I thought, than was good: and the flaming
darts of lightning that shot and shocked me that day, and the inner
secret gleams and revelations of Beauty which I had, and the pangs of
white-hot honey that tortured my soul and body, and were too much for
me, and made me sick, oh Heaven, what tongue could express all that deep
world of things? And at Ouchy with a backward wave of my arm I silently
motioned her from me, for I was dumb, and weak, and I left her there:
and all that long night her power was upon me, for she is stronger than
gravitation, which may be evaded, and than all the forces of life
combined, and the sun and the moon and the earth are nothing compared
with her; and when she was gone from me I was like a fish in the air, or
like a bird in the deep, for she is my element of life, made for me to
breathe in, and I drown without her: so that for many hours I lay on
that grassy hill leading to the burial-ground outside Ouchy that night,
like a man sore wounded, biting the grass.

What made things worse for me was her adoption of European clothes since
coming to this place: I believe that, in her adroit way, she herself
made some of her dresses, for one day I saw in her apartments a number
of coloured fashion-plates, with a confusion like dress-making; or she
may have been only modifying finished things from the shops, for her
Western dressing is not quite like what I remember of the modern female
style, but is really, I should say, quite her own, rather resembling the
Greek, or the eighteenth century. At any rate, the airs and graces are
as natural to her as feathers to parrots; and she has changes like the
moon; never twice the same, and always transcending her last phase and
revelation: for I could not have conceived of anyone in whom _taste_ was
a faculty so separate as in her, so positive and salient, like smelling
or sight--more like _smelling_: for it is the faculty, half Reason, half
Imagination, by which she fore-scents precisely what will suit
exquisitely with what; so that every time I saw her, I received the
impression of a perfectly novel, completely bewitching, work of Art: the
special quality of works of Art being to produce the momentary
conviction that anything else whatever could not possibly be so good.

Occasionally, from my window I would see her in the wood beyond the