singular fit and the vision I related to you. I have
never been the same man since; and I am glad of it. I now believe women
to be much more adorable than you painted them, and not half enough
adored." Suddenly he dropped the extremely English manner which he
generally affected in the idiom and construction of his speech, and
dropped back into something more like his own language. "The star that
was over my life is over it no longer. I have no life-star any longer.
The jewel of the southern sky withdraws his light, paling before the
white gold from the northern land. The gold that shall be mine through
all the cycles of the sun, the gold that neither man nor monarch shall
take from me. What have I to do with stars in heaven? Is not my star
come down to earth to abide with me through life? And when life is over
and the scroll is full, shall not my star bear me hence, beyond the
fiery foot-bridge, beyond the paradise of my people and its senseless
sensuality of houris and strong wine? Beyond the very memory of limited
and bounded life, to that life eternal where there is neither limit, nor
bound, nor sorrow? Shall our two souls not unite and be one soul to roam
through the countless circles of revolving outer space? Not through
years, or for times, or for ages--but for ever? The light of life is
woman, the love of life is the love of woman; the light that pales not,
the life that cannot die, the love that can know not any ending; _my_
light, _my_ life, and _my_ love!" His whole soul was in his voice, and
his whole heart; the twining white fingers, the half-closed eyes, and
the passionate quivering tone, told all he had left unsaid. It was
surely a high and a noble thing that he felt, worthy of the man in his
beauty of mind and body. He loved an ideal, revealed to him, as he
thought, in the shape of the fair English girl; he worshipped his ideal
through her, without a thought that he could be mistaken. Happy man!
Perhaps he had a better chance of going through life without any cruel
revelation of his mistake than falls to the lot of most lovers, for she
was surpassingly beautiful, and most good and true hearted. But are not
people always mistaken who think to find the perfect comprehended in the
imperfect, the infinite enchained and made tangible in the finite? Bah!
The same old story, the same old vicious circle, the everlastingly
recurring mathematical view of things that cannot be treated
mathematically; the fruitless att