“What I can’t understand about you builders of superfluous Jerusalems,” said Quentin, “is your utter dependence on your surroundings. Now I can be happy in a Houndsditch slum. Where I am, the heavenly city is about me. I am content with what I find. I do not ask to see the distant scene—one step enough for me.” “Don’t blaspheme,” said Sprot, who was a Christian. “Ruby thinks it’s heaven where it’s comfortable and she can sleep,” said Lychnis. “Personally, I can’t form the least idea what heaven may consist in. It certainly isn’t in my heart. It isn’t round us here, even—still less if Fulke turns it into a red-villa Jerusalem, or even a marble one. Are those twelve on the little mountain in heaven? A little too wizened for such a place, perhaps. One somehow expects heaven to be full of beautiful Greeks. And I suppose one expects to be the only woman there. Do you expect to be the only man there, Quentin?” “I should hope so,” he answered, “since I expect to obtain heaven when I....” She silenced him with a gesture, but his red lips smiled in his frizzy beard. “At any rate,” she went on, “one will not see western Europeans there, unshaved Polish Jews, cross-looking, mingy English tradesmen. I would like to see a man who didn’t look as if he was preoccupied with a corn. Not that I wish to be rude to any of you. I love your sweet, lined, thought-laden, nerve-ridden European faces. But when may I expect to see a face that is all pure beauty? When, Ambrose?” “I should think you very well might about here,” he answered. “The Dragon perhaps. Someone who lives on that rock in the Lotus Lake. Someone who broods on the stupendous forces of Nature out of the heart of repose.” “But Chinese can’t be handsome,” said Ruby. “They’re so fatuous, or else so fierce—and in any case so foreign.” But Lychnis suddenly held up her small orchid-hand enjoining silence. A wind came rustling along the forest, and boomed out across the valley like some fabulous dragonish bird. Sprot moved uneasily. “Someone coming,” he muttered. “Terence’s goat-rider!” Ruby clung to her father’s arm. He came riding along the edge of the forest, seated on a goat of more than natural size. He drove it with a branch of peach-blossom. His dress was fantastically rich, and he had a little red button in his hat. His face was plump and imperious; his tiny mouth ineffably calm. He turned in his saddle as he rode past, and the dark, slant-slit eyes in his face of dry gold bored into the thicket where they were hidden—terrible eyes, attentive and fierce, like the eyes of the tiger when they shine and are rapt with the mysterious and dreadful forces of Nature. 20