A clock sounded one of the later morning hours of the night as Gower Woodseer stood at his hotel door, having left Fleetwood with a band of revellers.  The night was now clear.  Stars were low over the ridge of pines, dropped to a league of our strange world to record the doings.  Beneath this roof lay the starry She.  He was elected to lie beneath it also:  and he beheld his heavenly lady floating on the lull of soft white cloud among her sister spheres.  After the way of imaginative young men, he had her features more accurately now she was hidden, and he idealized her more.  He could escape for a time from his coil of similes and paint for himself the irids of her large, long, grey eyes darkly rimmed; purest water-grey, lucid within the ring, beneath an arch of lashes.  He had them fast; but then he fell to contemplating their exceeding rareness; And the mystery of the divinely grey swung a kindled fancy to the flight with some queen-witch of woods, of whom a youth may dream under the spell of twilights, East or West, among forest branches.

She had these marvellous eyes and the glamour for men.  She had not yet met a man with the poetical twist in the brain to prize her elementally.  All admitted the glamour; none of her courtiers were able to name it, even the poetical head giving it a name did not think of the witch in her looks as a witch in her deeds, a modern daughter of the mediaeval.  To her giant squire the eyes of the lady were queer:  they were unlit glass lamps to her French suppliant; and to the others, they were attractively uncommon; the charm for them being in her fine outlines, her stature, carriage of her person, and unalterable composure; particularly her latent daring.  She had the effect on the general mind of a lofty crag-castle with a history.  There was a whiff of gunpowder exciting the atmosphere in the anecdotal part of the history known.

Woodseer sat for a certain time over his note-book.  He closed it with a thrilling conceit of the right thing written down; such as entomologists feel when they have pinned the rare insect.  But what is butterfly or beetle compared with the chiselled sentences carved out of air to constitute us part owner of the breathing image and spirit of an adored fair woman?  We repeat them, and the act of repeating them makes her come close on ours, by virtue of the eagle thought in the stamped gold of the lines.

Then, though she is not ever to be absolutely ours (and it is an impoverishing desire that she should be), we have beaten out the golden sentence—­the essential she and we in one.  But is it so precious after all?  A suspicious ring of an adjective drops us on a sickening descent.

The author dashed at his book, examined, approved, keenly enjoyed, and he murderously scratched the adjective.  She stood better without it, as a bright planet star issuing from clouds, which are perhaps an adornment to our hackneyed moon.  This done, he restored the book to his coat’s breast-pocket, smiling or sneering at the rolls of bank-notes there, disdaining to count them.  They stuffed an inner waistcoat pocket and his trousers also.  They at any rate warranted that we can form a calculation of the chances, let Lord Fleetwood rave as he may please.