Lucia leaned back now, for the first time, in the breathing space he gave her, attentively watching the man she proposed to make her secretary; and as she watched him she found herself defending him against her own criticism.  If he dropped his aitches it was not grossly as the illiterate do; she wouldn’t go so far as to say he dropped them; he slipped them, slided them; it was no more than a subtle slur, a delicate elision.  And that only in the commoner words, the current coin of his world.  He was as right as possible, she noticed, in all words whose acquaintance he had made on his own account.  And his voice—­his voice pleaded against her prejudice with all its lyric modulations.  Much may be forgiven to such voices.  And there were other points in his favour.

Kitty was right.  He was nice to look at.  She was beginning to know the changes of his face; she liked it best when, as now, its features became suddenly subtle and serious and straight.  At the moment his eyes, almost opaque from the thickness of their blue, were dull under the shadow of the eye-bone.  But when he grew excited (as he frequently did) they had a way of clearing suddenly, they flashed first colour at you, then light, then fire.  That was what they were doing now; for now he let himself go.

His Helen, he said, was the eternal Beauty, the eternal Dream.  Beauty perpetually desirous of incarnation, perpetually unfaithful to flesh and blood; the Dream that longs for the embrace of reality, that wanders never satisfied till it finds a reality as immortal as itself.  Helen couldn’t stay in the house of Theseus, or the house of Menelaus or the house of Priam.  Theseus was a fool if he thought he would take her by force, and Paris was a fool if he thought he could keep her for pleasure; and Menelaus was the biggest fool of all if he expected her to bear him children and to mind his house.  They all do violence to the divinity in her, and she vindicates it by eluding them.  Her vengeance is the vengeance of an immortal made victim to mortality.  Helen of Argos and Troy is the Dream divorced from reality.

“Yes—­yes.  I see.”  She leaned back in her chair, fascinated, while the wonderful voice went on, covering its own offences with exquisite resonances and overtones.

“This divorce is the cause of all the evil that can happen to men and women.  Because of it Helen becomes an instrument in the hands of Aphrodite—­Venus Genetrix—­do you see?  She’s the marriage-breaker, the destroyer of men.  She brings war and pestilence and death.  She is the supreme illusion.  But Helen in Leuce is the true Helen.  In Leuce, you know, she appears as she is, in her divine form, freed from the tyranny of perpetual incarnation.  I can’t explain it, but that’s the idea.  Don’t you see how the chorus in praise of Aphrodite breaks off into a prayer for deliverance from her?  And at the end I make Athene bring Helen to Achilles, who was her enemy in Troy.—­That’s part of the idea, too.”