For Evaine of Peter’s Tomb was so surpassingly lovely that she excelled all the other women his gaze had ever beheld. The colors of this beautiful young girl’s two eyes were nicely matched, and her nose stood just equidistant between them. Beneath this was her mouth, and she had also a pair of ears. The girl was young, she exhibited no deformity anywhere, and the enamored glance of the young man could perceive in her no fault. There was, to be sure, a puzzling likeness to somebody he had once known, but Gerald’s quick wits soon unriddled the mystery. This woman reminded him of Evelyn Townsend. Nor was this all. He observed now that this woman was, just as he had suspected, a Fox-Spirit, for now from Evaine of Peter’s Tomb emanated the power of her magic. That magic which overmasters all animals now smote at Gerald; and in a mildly amusing way he found its assaults really quite interesting. “For this is the goety of beasts,” he reflected. “This is the brutish half-magic of the wu which maddens men, along with all other animals in their rutting season, and robs them of self-control. This magic persuades me, almost, that I, too, am only a bundle of cellular matter upon its way to becoming manure. Yes, my life, too, at just this moment, seems but a grudged brief season of bewildered appetites and of baffled surmise such as is the life of a mortal man. I, too, seem a mere human being passing from the forgotten to the unforeseeable. Under the assaults of this small carnal magic, I seem again to go in that continuous masked loneliness which mortal persons in Lichfield and elsewhere call living. I long to put out of mind the frailness and the transiency of my hold upon living. The nonsensical notion has occurred to me that such forgetfulness may be hired by bringing the epidermis which masks me into superficial contact with the homogenous animal matter in which hides this Fox-Spirit.... Yes, I am being, as it were, maddened with desire; I am very rapidly becoming the prey of this Fox-Spirit’s irresistible powers of fascination, so to speak. And I find it really quite interesting to observe how this half-magic which destroys so many men now impiously strikes beyond its proper arena, at that which is divine; and how this foolish magic attempts to deceive even me, who am a Savior and a sun god.” Such were the cursory reflections which passed through Gerald’s mind in the while that he said, aloud, “Good-evening, ma’am!” The Fox-Spirit Evaine, without replying to him directly, took out of her bosom a white gem about the size of an orange. She tossed this up into the air, and caught it again. Gerald conjectured that this was her soul, but he made no comment. He displayed to her his cock, saying, as was needful, “I entreat you to accept my rooster—”