He said:  ’I can tell you I met her and she lives.  I could as soon swim in that torrent or leap the mountain as repeat what she spoke, or sketch a feature of her.  She goes into the blood, she is a new idea of women.  She has the face that would tempt a gypsy to evil tellings.  I could think of it as a history written in a line:  Carinthia, Saint and Martyr!  As for comparisons, they are flowers thrown into the fire.’

‘I have had that—­I have thought that,’ said Lord Fleetwood.  ’Go on; talk of her, pray; without comparisons.  I detest them.  How did you meet her?  What made you part?  Where is she now?  I have no wish to find her, but I want thoroughly to believe in her.’

Another than Woodseer would have perceived the young lord’s malady.  Here was one bitten by the serpent of love, and athirst for an image of the sex to serve for the cooling herb, as youth will be.  Woodseer put it down to a curious imaginative fellowship with himself.  He forgot the lord, and supposed he had found his own likeness, less gifted in speech.  After talking of Carinthia more and more in the abstract, he fell upon his discovery of the Great Secret of life, against which his hearer struggled for a time, though that was cooling to him too; but ultimately there was no resistance, and so deep did they sink into the idea of pure contemplation, that the idea of woman seemed to have become a part of it.  No stronger proof of their aethereal conversational earnestness could be offered.  A locality was given to the Great Secret, and of course it was the place where the most powerful recent impression had been stamped on the mind of the discoverer:  the shadowy valley rolling from the slate-rock.  Woodseer was too artistic a dreamer to present the passing vision of Carinthia with any associates there.  She passed:  the solitude accepted her and lost her; and it was the richer for the one swift gleam:  she brought no trouble, she left no regrets; she was the ghost of the rocky obscurity.  But now remembering her mountain carol, he chanced to speak of her as a girl.

‘She is a girl?’ cried Lord Fleetwood, frowning over an utter revolution of sentiment at the thought of the beautiful Gorgon being a girl; for, rapid as he was to imagine, he had raised a solid fabric upon his conception of Carinthia the woman, necessarily the woman—­logically.  Who but the woman could look the Gorgon!  He tried to explain it to be impossible for a girl to wear the look:  and his notion evidently was, that it had come upon a beautiful face in some staring horror of a world that had bitten the tender woman.  She touched him sympathetically through the pathos.

Woodseer flung out vociferously for the contrary.  Who but a girl could look the beautiful Gorgon!  What other could seem an emanation of the mountain solitude?  A woman would instantly breathe the world on it to destroy it.  Hers would be the dramatic and not the poetic face.  It would shriek of man, wake the echoes with the tale of man, slaughter all. quietude.  But a girl’s face has no story of poisonous intrusion.  She indeed may be cast in the terrors of Nature, and yet be sweet with Nature, beautiful because she is purely of Nature.  Woodseer did his best to present his view irresistibly.  Perhaps he was not clear; it was a piece of skiamachy, difficult to render clear to the defeated.