“Ellen—­you know what I mean?  There’s a particular kind of rapture that comes when you’re looking at an impersonal thing.  I mean a thing that doesn’t amuse you, doesn’t tickle up your greed or vanity, doesn’t feed you.  Like looking at the dawn.  I feel like that when I look at you.  And yet you are so sweet too.  Oh, you dear Puritan, you will not like me to say you are like scent.  But you are.  Even at the feminine game you could beat all other women.  You see, it is the loveliest thing in the world to watch women dancing; but with other women, when their bodies stop it’s all over.  They stand beside you showing minds that have never moved, that have been paralysed since they were babies.  But when you stopped dancing your soul would go on dancing.  Your mind has as neat ankles as your body.  You are the treasure of this earth!  Ellen, do you know that I am a little frightened?  I do believe that love is a real magic.”

He had fallen into that lecturer’s manner she had noticed on the first night at the office, when he had told them about bullfights.  Her heart pricked with pride because she perceived that now she was his subject.

“I have been up and down the world and I have seen no other real magic.  I do not believe that in this age God has altered anyone.  People love God nowadays as much as the temperaments they were born with tell them to.  He has grown too old for miracles.  After two thousand years he has no longer the force to turn water into wine.  Ellen, I love your dear prim smile.  But always, everywhere, I have found the love of men and women doing that.  Sometimes the love of places does something very like it.  A man may land on a strange island, and abandon the journey on which he set out, and the home he set out from, to live there for ever.  But there his soul has just sunk to sleep.  It hasn’t been changed.  But love changes people.  I’ve seen the dirtiest little greasers clean themselves up and become capable of decency and courage, because there was some woman about.  And oh, my darling! that happened with quite ordinary women. Vin Ordinaire. Pieces cut from the roll of ordinary female stuff.  But how will the magic word act when you are part of the spell—­you who are the most wonderful thing in the whole world, who are the flower of the earth’s crop of beauty, who have such a genius for just being!  Oh, it will be a tremendous thing.”

He paused, marvelling at his own exultation, which marked, he knew, so great a change in him.  For always before it had been his chief care that nothing at all should happen to him emotionally, and especially had he feared this alchemy of passion.  He had been unable to pray for purity, since he felt it an ideal ridiculously not indigenous to this richly-coloured three-dimensional universe, and he had observed that it made men liable to infatuations in later life; but he had prayed for lust, which he knew to be the most drastic preventive of love.  But it had evaded