“Ettarre, your unattainable beauty tears my heart. Is that black-browed Molière your lover too? What favors have you granted him? You perceive I am jealous. How can I be otherwise, when there is nothing, nothing in me that does not cry out for love of you? And I am forbidden ever to win quite to you, ever to touch you, ever to see you even save in my dreams!” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ V Horvendile to Ettarre: In the Conciergerie THEY waited in a big dark room of the Conciergerie, with many other condemned émigrants, until the tumbrils should come to fetch them to the Place de la Révolution. They stood beneath a narrow barred window, set high in the wall, so that thin winter sunlight made the girl’s face visible. Misery was about them, death waited without: and it did not matter a pennyworth. “Ettarre, I know to-day that all my life I have been seeking you. Very long ago when I was a child it was made clear that you awaited me somewhere; and, I recollect now, I used to hunger for your coming with a longing which has not any name. And when I went about the dusty world I still believed you waited somewhere—till I should find you, as I inevitably must, or soon or late. Did I go upon a journey to some unfamiliar place?—it might be that unwittingly I traveled toward your home. I could never pass a walled garden where green tree-tops showed without suspecting, even while I shrugged to think how wild was the imagining, that there was only the wall between us. I did not know the color of your eyes, but I knew what I would read there. And for a fevered season I appeared to encounter many women of earth who resembled you—” “All women resemble me, Horvendile. Whatever flesh they may wear as a garment, and however time-frayed or dull-hued or stained by horrible misuse that garment may seem to be, the wearer of that garment is no less fair than I, could any man see her quite clearly. Horvendile, were that not true, could our great Author find anywhere a woman’s body which wickedness and ugliness controlled unchecked, all the big stars which light the universe, and even the tiny sun that our earth spins about, would be blown out like unneeded candles, for the Author’s labor would have been frustrated and misspent.”