The reader now dreads the inevitable love scene, and I, too, feel that an apology is needed. For so many novelists, ballad-makers, jongleurs, troubadours, minstrels, poets, and bards have sung the praises of perfect, adorable and captivating ladies that I am inclined to lament with one of them that I have sung all love's great songs And have no new songs to sing, But I'll sing the old songs again. And so I will. We will have those old songs again, for I will not give my heroine "plain but interesting features" or "a noble rather than beautiful countenance with intellect shining in her eyes," or even in a candid moment declare her to possess "a haunting plainness all her own." But apart from all this there is the truth to consider, and this young girl was assuredly one of the most perfect women God ever made by accident or Satan by design. For she stood there in front of him in the radiant, dancing, dewy morning, happy and unperturbed, in her gracious half-human beauty, not majestic, not passionate, not mysterious, but unreal from her very loveliness, a nymph, not of the woods or rivers, but of the sea--yet not of the tempestuous main--no tall sad siren of a treacherous rock, but a sweet, young pleasant nymph from a bay where the sun is always shining, a sea-sand nymph not unacquainted with flowers. For when I would deal with her face and body, all those feeble, pretty comparisons whereby the pen of the writer strives to emulate the brush of the painter, must be of the sea or of flowers. Her dark hair, fringed against the gold lace of her scarf--but those same painters (whom all we word-workers envy bitterly but dare not say so) have shown how many confluent colours--hyacinth and blue and red and deep red gold, gleam in the shadowy hollows of the hair we fools call dark. ... Dark! As the sea-water in a sunlit bay lies dark between two little island rocks yet ripples in the wind, and the sea flowers turn it red along the marge and the depths glow violet in the midst, and the sunshine is all near but hidden--am I not now describing the dark hair of a lovely woman? "But her eyes, poor poet, her eyes--are they not also pools of the salt sea?" Not the eyes of this lass, my gentle friend. Her eyes were of finer and subtler essence than the heavy water of the sea. They were blue--which is ever most wonderful with dark lashes, dark brows and sea-dark hair--but not the dark blue of a rock pool nor yet quite the light broken blue of the blinking waves in the calm and brilliant bay. Her eyes were of a light dry fire--the blue not of sea nor of sky, but rather of the glowing air that swims about the idle fisher's boat hour after hour on summer days. So that you could not tell if they were deep eyes or light wayward eyes,--those little gay discs of laughing sunlit air.