the troubled gaze of Laura, who wore in the picture a shy and startled look, like that of a wild thing suddenly trapped in its reserve.  He had never, even in his own mind, analysed his feeling for the woman whom he was content to call his friend—­he hesitated to condemn himself almost because he feared to question—­but whenever he entered alone his empty room he knew that he turned instinctively to draw strength and courage from her pictured face.  It was a face that had followed after the ideal beauty, and in her spiritual isolation, as of one devoted to an inner vision, he had always found the peculiar pathetic quality of her charm.  Into her verse, chastened and restrained by the sense for perfection which dwelt in her art, she had put, he knew, this same cloistral vision of an unrealised world—­a vision which had expanded and blossomed in the luxuriant if slightly formal garden of her intellect.  The world she looked upon was a world, as Adams had once said, “seen through the haze of a golden temperament”—­the dream of an imaginative mysticism, of a conventual purity, a dream which is to the reality as the soul of a man is to the body.  And it was this inspired divination, this luminous idealism, which had caused Adams to exclaim when he put down her first small gray volume:  “Is it possible that we can still see visions?”

A little later, when he came to know her, he found that the vision she looked upon had coloured not only her own soul, but even the outward daily happenings of her life.  For him she was from the first compacted of divine mysteries, of exquisite surprises, and he loved to fancy that he could see her genius burning like a clear flame within her and shining at vivid moments with a still soft radiance in her face.  He always thought of her soul as of something luminous, and there were instants when it seemed to touch her eyes and her mouth with an edge of light.  Beyond this her complexities remained for him as on the day when he first saw her—­if she was obscure it was the obscurity of a star seen through a fog—­and the desire to understand lost itself presently in the bewilderment of his misapprehension.  At last, however, he had put her, as it were, tentatively aside, had relinquished his attempt to reduce her to a formula with the despairing admission that she was, take her as you would, a subtlety that compelled one to a mental effort.  The effort which he had up to this time associated with the society of women had been of anything but a mental character.  There was the effort of putting one’s best physical foot in advance, the effort of keeping one’s person conspicuously in evidence and one’s intellect as unobtrusively in abeyance—­the material effort of appearing always in one’s best trousers, the moral effort of presenting always one’s worst intelligence.  It had seemed to him until he met Laura—­and his opinion was the effect of a limited experience upon a large philosophic ignorance—­that the female sex played the part in Nature which is