She saw Linda descending the marble stairs to the lower floor where the games were kept in a somber corridor, and heard a voice halting her irresolute passage: “Hello, Bellina.” That wasn't her name, and she corrected him, waiting afterward to listen to a strange fairy-like tale. The solitary, sick-looking man, with inky shadows under fixed eyes, was so actual that she recaptured the pungent drift of his burning cigarette. He talked about love in a bitter intensity that hurt her. Yet, at first, he had said that she was lovely, a touch of her ... forever in the memory. Mostly, however, he spoke of a beautiful passion. It had largely vanished, his explanation continued; men had come to worship other things. Plato started it. She recalled Plato, as well, in connection with Dodge; now, it appeared to her, that remote name had always been at the back of her consciousness. There were other names, other men, of an age long ago in Italy. Their ideal, religion, was contained in the adoration of a woman, but not her body--it was a love of her spirit, the spirit their purity of need recognized, perhaps helped to create. It was a passion as different as possible in essence from all she had observed about her. It was useless for common purposes, withheld from Arnaud Hallet. The man, seriously addressing the serious uncomprehending interest of ten, proceeded with a description of violins--but she had heard them through all her life--and a parting that left only a white glove for remembrance. Then he had repeated that line, in Italian, which, not long back, her husband had recalled. The old gesture toward the stars, the need to escape fatality--how she had suffered from that! Yet it was a service of the body, a faith spiritual because, here, it was never to be won, never to be realized in warm embrace. It had no recognition in flesh, and it was the reward of no prayer or humility or righteousness. Only beauty knew and possessed it. His image grew dim like the blurring of his voice by pain and the shadow of death. Linda's thoughts and longing turned again to Dodge; it seemed to her that he no more than took up the recital where the other was silent. Pleydon--was it at Markue's party or later?--talking about “Homer's children” had meant the creations of great artists, in sound or color or words or form, through that supreme love unrealized in other life. The statue of Simon Downige, towering before her against the sky and above the sea, held in immutable bronze his conviction. The meager bundle and crude stick rested by shoes clogged with mud; Simon's body was crushed with weariness; but under the sweat-plastered brow his gaze pierced indomitable and undismayed to the vision of a place of truth.