“Have you ever seen anything like it before?” Alicia asked Captain Yardley; and he said he thought he had once, in Algiers, but not nearly so well done.  Arnold rose again to go, but the Magdalene had begun to use her arts upon Pilate in the well-known scene about which the newspapers reported long afterwards how the Pope had declared that if Miss Howe had not been a Protestant and so impervious he would have excommunicated her—­and as he looked his movement imperceptibly changed to afford him a better place.  He put an undecided hand upon a prop of the box that rose behind Alicia’s shoulder, and so stood leaning and looking, more conspicuous in the straight lines and short shoulder-cape of the frock of his Order than he knew.  Hilda, in one of those impenetrable regards which she threw straight in front of her while Pilate yawned and posed nearer and nearer the desire of the Magdalene to be admitted to his household, was at once aware of him.  Presently he sat down again—­it was still the profane, the fabulous, the horrible Patullo, but a strain of pure gold had come into the fabric worth holding in view, impossible, indeed, to close the eyes upon.  Far enough it was from any semblance to historical fact, but almost possible, almost admissible, in the form of the woman, as historical fiction.  She dared to sit upon the floor now, in the ungraceful, huddled Eastern fashion, clasping her knees to her breast, with her back half turned to her lord the friend of Caesar, so that he could not see the design that sat behind the mask of her sharp indifference.  She rested her chin upon her knees, and let the blankness of her beauty exclaim upon the subtlety of her replies, plainly measuring the power of her provocation against the impoverished quality that camp and grove, court and schools, might leave upon august Roman sensibilities.  It was the old, old sophistication, so perfect in its concentration behind the kol-brushed eyes and the brown breasts, the igniting, flickering, raging of an instinct upon the stage.  Alicia, when it was over, said to Mrs. Yardley, “How the modern woman goes off upon side issues?” to which that lady nodded a rather suspicious assent.

Long before Hilda had begun to act for Arnold, to play to his special consciousness, he was fastened to his chair, held down, so to speak, by a whirlpool of conflicting impulses.  She did so much more than “lift” the inventive vulgarisation of the Bible story in the common sense; she inspired and transfused it so that wherever she appeared people irresistibly forgot the matter for her, or made private acknowledgments to the effect that something was to be said even for an impious fantasy which gave her so unique an opportunity.  To Arnold her vivid embodiment of an incident in that which was his morning and evening meditation made special appeal, and though it was in a way as if she had thrust her heathen torch into his Holy of Holies, he saw it lighted with fascination,