"The horses," I cried, rising from the table, "ring for the horses; go and tell Miss Geraldine to dress, for I am going to take her for a drive. Go." I stamped my foot, I was speaking like a man. I was suddenly intoxicated. I felt hat, boots and belt upon me; the falcon was on my wrist. I clapped my hand on my left hip and was astonished to find--no sword. That, somehow, brought me to, and I sat down at the table again feeling shrunk--shrunk? do you understand that word?--shrunk like an apple that has been all winter in the cellar--shrunk like a warrior who wakes to find himself a woman. "She hung down her head and all her little face grew red," how exactly those words brought her image before me. This little milksop. I was sitting at the table; the old butler had gone to order the carriage; the light of the autumn day came greyly through the great double windows, a spray of withered wistaria was tapping at one of the panes like the hand of a ghost. Before me, on the opposite wall, hung a convex Venetian mirror, one of those strange mirrors that are made so perfectly and so truly that they reflect everything just as it is, even the atmosphere, so that a room reflected by them seems like a real room. I was staring at my own reflection in the mirror, and wondering over again at my own likeness to the portrait of Gerald Wilder--when--the door in the mirror opened, a figure the size of my thumb entered the mirror room, a figure lithe and more gorgeously clad than any caterpillar. I knew quite well that it was only Geraldine who had opened the door behind me, and was therefore reflected in the mirror. I knew that quite well, yet I watched the mirror without moving: the little figure seemed to hold me in a spell. It came up softly behind the woman seated at the table--the woman with the face so like Gerald Wilder; it paused as if undecided. I watched. Geraldine evidently was utterly ignorant of the mirror and its picture. Geraldine the observed imagined herself unobserved: then, like a little thief, she bent her lips to kiss the woman's hair without the woman knowing. I threw my head back and caught the kiss upon my lips, I threw my arms back and caught her round the neck; never was a thief so caught in his own trap. Then I turned round, and let her go, and confronted her, all at the same time. And there she stood, "with her head hung down and all her little face grown red." Love has never been described properly: all that about roses and altars is nonsense. Love is like being in a beautiful and mysterious room, and you push a curtain aside and you find a more mysterious and more beautiful room, and you see another curtain. How that comparison would shock the people who write poetry. Imagine comparing love to a suite of rooms.