reception in the faded golden splendours of the Venetian palace to which she has dragged herself to die, smiling bravely at her guests, bidding musicians strike up to keep them gay, playing, to preserve her hands from any gesture of anguish or appearance of lassitude, with the rope of pearls that seems to weigh down her wasted body. Yet one gets one's vision through the hard, envious eyes of Kate Croy, who is the hawk circling over the poor dying dove, and the appalled gaze of Merton Densher, Kate's secret lover, whom she has trapped into a profession of love for Milly so that the deluded girl will leave him her fortune. And one sees her most radiantly of all in the interview which she grants to Densher when she has discovered the cruel fraud practised on her and is dying of the knowledge, although one is told no more than that "she received me just as usual, in that glorious great _salone_, in the dress she always wears, from her inveterate corner of her sofa." From the love it lit in his heart, a love so great that for very shame Kate cannot marry him even when her machinations have achieved complete success at Milly's death, one perceives that this was the dying girl's assumption, that her sweetness and strength must at that hour have flowered so divinely that the skies opened and they were no longer matter for a human history. But about this masterpiece, too, there can be nothing said. One just sits and looks up, while the Master lifts his old grief, changed by his craftsmanship into eternal beauty as the wafer is changed to the Host by the priest's liturgy, enclosed from decay, prisoned in perfection, in the great shining crystal bowl of his art. V THE GOLDEN BOWL