And Gerald was enraptured. For this Evarvan of the Mirror was so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld. Yet somehow it was not the coloring nor the placing of her features that he was noting. Rather, he was observing himself and the thing which was happening to this careful, this well-poised, fastidious, parched, rather pitiable Gerald whom for so many years he had known. The creature had not for a great while, not since, indeed, the days of his first insanity about Evelyn, been visited by any real emotion: now, momentarily at least, he was ablaze: he was caught perhaps: and it was this imminent personal peril that Gerald was noting, aloofly, with a drugged sense of derisory exultation. For this Gerald, as it seemed to him, had known quite well, a great while ago, before his lips had touched for pastime’s sake the lips of any woman anywhere, that this woman who, it seemed, was called Evarvan, existed in some place, and waited for him, and would by and by be found. That very important fact, which a boy had known, a thriftless, very silly young man had let slip out of mind. Throughout all the twenty-eight years of his living, it seemed to Gerald, this Evarvan had been the true and perfect love of his heart’s core.... To the extreme romanticism of this phrase he conceded a smile: that he should have concocted a phrase so abominable showed him just now to be neither fastidious nor well poised.... Nevertheless, here was the woman whose existence he, even in Lichfield, had always dimly divined, and of whom—he had it now,—of whom Evelyn Townsend had been a parodying shadow in human flesh. The likeness had been just sufficient to get him into a great deal of trouble. He saw that likeness now, quite plainly. “And this woman too is going to get me into trouble, I very much fear. For all my being cries out to her. Eh, Gerald, one needs caution here, my lad, you who find trouble uncongenial!” Evarvan spoke. And she was speaking, oddly enough, as it seemed to him, of that Evelyn who went about Lichfield immured in the body which was a poor copy of Evarvan’s body. Yet Gerald was listening hardly at all. He did not like the strong, insane and over-youthful emotions which this woman roused in him. They endangered his welfare. For this woman was awakening in him those old, unforgotten fervors which he had once felt for Evelyn Townsend, and which had betrayed him into the horrid bondage of an illicit love-affair. This Evarvan was ensnaring him, he knew, into the insanities appropriate to youth and inexperience: and such nonsense had to be controlled. So it was half dazedly Gerald protested that—quite apart from the claims of his divine duties as a Savior and a sun god, and apart too from the obligations he was under to ascend the throne of Antan,—he could no longer endure the stupidities and the fretfulness and the jealousies of the Evelyn who had made adultery wholly unendurable.