She continued to study the ancient painting. Her fingers were playing with the ends of her lace veil. "Besides," he went on, "if I had been in love a dozen times, it wouldn't signify. For I should have been in love with ordinary usual human women. They're the only sort I ever met--till I met her. She's of a totally different order--as distinct from them as ... What shall I say? Oh, as unlike them as starfire is unlike dull clay. Starfire--starfire--the wonderful, high, white-burning starfire of her spirit, that's the thing that strikes you most in her. It shines through her. It shines in her eyes, it shines in her hair, her adorable, soft, dark, warm and fragrant hair; it shines in her very voice; it shines in every word she utters, even in the unkindest." "Dear me! what an alarmingly refulgent person you depict!" laughed Maria Dolores, her eyes still on the wall. "I have no gift for word-painting," said John; "though I doubt if the words are yet invented that could fitly paint my lady. She grows in beauty day by day. It's a literal fact--every fresh time I see her, she is perceptibly more lovely than the last, more love-compelling in her loveliness. But 'tis a thing unpaintable, indescribable, as indescribable as the perfume of a rose. Oh, why haven't I five thousand a year?" "You harp so persistently upon your desire for money," suggested Maria Dolores, "one might infer she was a commodity, to be bought and sold. You begin at the wrong end. What good would five or fifty thousand a year do you, if you had not begun by winning her love? "No, I begin at the proper end, worse luck," John answered, glooming. "For, without a decent income, I have no right even to try to win her love. "And that being so," questioned Maria Dolores, "I hope you conscientiously avoid her society, or, when you meet, make yourself consistently disagreeable to her? "There's no need for such precautions," John replied. "There's no fear for her. She regards me as a casual and passing acquaintance. So I make myself no more disagreeable than I am by nature. And if I avoided her society, (which I am far from doing), it would be not for her sake, but for my own. For, though her society is to me a kind of anticipation of the joys of Heaven, yet when I leave it and find myself alone, the reaction is dreary in the superlative degree; and the fear, which perpetually haunts me (for I know nothing of her plans), lest I shall never see her again, is agonizing as a foretaste of--Heaven's antipode. Oh, I love her!" He took, involuntarily I dare say, a step in her direction. She retreated under the vaulting of the _porte-cochère_. "You seem," she commented, "to be getting a good deal of emotional experience,--which doubtless some day you will find of value. Why not, instead of gardener, embark as novelist or poet? Here is material you could then turn to account."