"Surely theirs is a magical repose: a deeper calm than that of sleep. Oh, I can forgive much to the superstition of astrology. Those planets deserve to be influences if they are not. The malignant heart would of course make their shine sinister; but a generous nature must deem those clear rays benignant. I do. But it is the common effect of Beauty on me. I warm, I dilate in her presence. She is a glorious spirit." "Ay, to a man of taste." "Beauty of course is a spirit interpenetrating all that delights and elevates. But she is incarnate too, sometimes; falling, I suppose, from the heavens like that meteor there," I said, pointing to an exhalation that rushed with yellow tresses streaming through the dark; "and taking the shape of a woman when she touches the earth." "But is not innocence a condition of beauty?" he inquired, turning his dusky gaze upon me. "It should be." "Then do not make your spirit take the shape of woman." I laughed. "What shape would you have her?" He shrugged his shoulders. "I hardly know," he answered: "unless you make her a new-born babe." "I fear you have the scholar's contempt for the _tendre passion_," said I. "But listen now to a strange story. Do you see those trees yonder?" "Yes, Sir." "One night--it was clear with moonlight--I strolled out to breathe the air. My excursion extended to those fields you can see from your bedroom window. There I lingered. The village clock struck two. Hardly had the silvery notes died, when----" I paused. "You returned home, Sir?" "No. But looking, I perceived the Spirit of Beauty walking beneath the starlight, draped in white, with eyes deep and beautiful, in which the moon hid itself for love, with a face of marble, passionless as the feature of the mother of Paphus ere the sculptor's adoration made her rosy with life." He showed his gleaming teeth in a smile of which he thought the gloom would hide the contempt. "Sir," he said, "you are talking the language of the romancist." "I am talking the language of truth." "At two o'clock in the morning," he exclaimed, blowing a white cloud on the air, "the female shapes one meets abroad are seldom spiritual. How they may look in the country, and by starlight, I do not know; but by gaslight their cadaverous complexion is commonly cloaked with paint; and if their eyes are bright, it is rather with a spirituous than a spiritual ray." "Ah, Martelli, you are a cynic--by which I mean, a practical, astute man, who makes the root and not the flower of fact or fancy his business. A commendable quality! All the same, I would not part with my love of illusion. This essential difference of character will make us get on well together; though, to be plain, before I knew you, my opinion was that if I hoped to please or be pleased, my comrade must be a man of sympathies identical with my own." "A common and generous error," he replied; "but time corrects those crudities."