She took the red bonnet from her head, and turned. She flung her bonnet fair and high. So was courteous Anavalt assured that the Queen of Elfhame was as he had hoped. For when seen thus, from behind, the witless Queen was hollow and shadow-colored, because Maid Vae is just the bright thin mask of a woman, and, if looked at from behind, she is like any other mask, with no more thickness than has canvas or paper. So when she faced him now and smiled,--and as if in embarrassment looked down and pushed aside a thigh bone with her little foot,--then Anavalt could see that the Elle Maid was, when properly regarded, a lovely and most dear illusion. He kissed her. He was content. Here was the woman he desired, the woman who did not exist in the world where people have souls. The Elle Maid had no mortal body that time would parody and ruin, she had no brain to fashion dreams of which he would fall short, she had no heart that he would hurt. There was an abiding peace in this quiet Wood of Elfhame wherein no love could enter, and nobody could, in consequence, hurt anybody else very deeply. At court the silken ladies wept for Anavalt, and three women were not ever to be healed of their memories: but in the Wood of Elfhame, where all were soulless masks, there were no memories and no weeping, there were no longer two sides to everything, and a man need look for no reverses. "I think we shall do very well here," said courteous Anavalt, as yet again he kissed Maid Vae. V CELESTIAL ARCHITECTURE "To this end, that Scyrian Pherecydes, Pythagoras his Master, broached in the East among the Heathens first the immortality of the Soul, as Trismegistus did in Egypt, with a many of feigned Gods. 'Twas for a politic end and to this purpose the old Poets feigned those Elysian fields, their Æcus, Minos, and Rhadamanthus, their infernal Judges, and those Stygian lakes, fiery Phlegethons, Pluto's kingdom, and variety of torments after death." _5_. _Celestial Architecture_ § 44 The literary artist plays, I had said, with death. But everybody played with death: it was the one subject not anywhere to be approached except in a spirit of sober superficiality. And I wanted--in at any event this epilogue to the Biography,--to offend the sensibilities of nobody. At forty-five one has become, with no choice in the matter, bourgeois; and has no least desire to épater one's clan.