have been in love with her she
was not an inevitable topic.

Within a week after my return to London I went to the opera, of which I
had always been much of a devotee. I arrived too late for the first act
of "Lohengrin," but the second was just beginning, and I gave myself
up to it with no more than a glance at the house. When it was over I
treated myself, with my glass, from my place in the stalls, to a general
survey of the boxes, making doubtless on their contents the reflections,
pointed by comparison, that are most familiar to the wanderer restored
to London. There was a certain proportion of pretty women, but I
suddenly became aware that one of these was far prettier than the
others. This lady, alone in one of the smaller receptacles of the grand
tier and already the aim of fifty tentative glasses, which she sustained
with admirable serenity--this single exquisite figure, placed in the
quarter furthest removed from my stall, was a person, I immediately
felt, to cause one's curiosity to linger. Dressed in white, with
diamonds in her hair and pearls on her neck, she had a pale radiance
of beauty which even at that distance made her a distinguished presence
and, with the air that easily attaches to lonely loveliness in public
places, an agreeable mystery. A mystery however she remained to me only
for a minute after I had levelled my glass at her: I feel to this moment
the startled thrill, the shock almost of joy with which I suddenly
encountered in her vague brightness a rich revival of Flora Saunt. I say
a revival because, to put it crudely, I had on that last occasion left
poor Flora for dead. At present perfectly alive again, she was altered
only, as it were, by resurrection. A little older, a little quieter,
a little finer and a good deal fairer, she was simply transfigured by
recovery. Sustained by the reflection that even recovery wouldn't enable
her to distinguish me in the crowd, I was free to look at her well. Then
it was it came home to me that my vision of her in her great goggles
had been cruelly final. As her beauty was all there was of her, that
machinery had extinguished her, and so far as I had thought of her
in the interval I had thought of her as buried in the tomb her stern
specialist had built. With the sense that she had escaped from it came a
lively wish to return to her; and if I didn't straightway leave my place
and rush round the theatre and up to her box it was because I was fixed
to the sp