Another noticeable feature of Hesper’s face was an ever-present sadness—­not as of a dull grief, but as of some shining sorrow, a quality which gave her face much arresting interest.  It seemed one great, rich tear.  One loved to dwell upon it as upon those intense stretches of evening sky when the day yearns through half-shut eyelids in the west.  One continually wondered what story it meant, for some it must mean.

Watching her thus quietly, day by day, it seemed to me that as the weeks from her first coming went by, this sadness deepened; and I could not forbear one day questioning the elder Hesperides about her, thus bringing upon myself a revelation I had little expected.  For, said she, ’she was glad I had spoken to her, for she had long wished to ask me to use my influence with my friend, that he might cease paying Hesper attentions which he could not mean in earnest, but which she knew were already causing Hesper to be fond of him.  Having become friendly with her, she had found out her secret and remonstrated with her, with the result that she had avoided Narcissus for some time, but not without much misery to herself, over which she was continually brooding.’

All this was an utter surprise, and a saddening one; for I had grown to feel much interest in the girl, and had been especially pleased by all absence of the flighty tendencies with which too many girls in public service tempt men to their own destruction.  She had seemed to me to bear herself with a maidenly self-respect that spoke of no little grace of breeding.  She had two very strong claims on one’s regard.  She was evidently a woman, in the deep, tragic sense of that word, and a lady in the only true sense of that.  The thought of a life so rich in womanly promise becoming but another of the idle playthings of Narcissus filled me with something akin to rage, and I was not long in saying some strong words to him.  Not that I feared for her the coarse ‘ruin’ the world alone thinks of.  Is that the worst that can befall woman?  What of the spiritual deflowering, of which the bodily is but a symbol?  If the first fine bloom of the soul has gone, if the dream that is only dreamed once has grown up in the imagination and been once given, the mere chastity of the body is a lie, and whatever its fecundity, the soul has nought but sterility to give to another.  It is not those kisses of the lips—­kisses that one forgets as one forgets the roses we smelt last year—­which profane; they but soil the vessel of the sacrament, and it is the sacrament itself which those consuming spirit-kisses, which burn but through the eyes, may desecrate.  It is strange that man should have so long taken the precisely opposite attitude in this matter, caring only for the observation of the vessel, and apparently dreaming not of any other possible approach to the sanctities.  Probably, however, his care has not been of sanctities at all.  Indeed, most have, doubtless, little suspicion of the existence of such, and the symbol has been and is but a selfish superstition amongst them—­woman, a symbol whose meaning is forgotten, but still the object of an ignorant veneration, not unrelated to the preservation of game.