’She is the coeur d’or of our time; the one soul I would sacrifice these flowers to.’

‘A bit of a blue-stocking, I think I have heard said.’

’She might have been admitted to the Hotel Rambouillet, without being anything of a Precieuse.  She is the woman of the largest heart now beating.’

‘Mr. Redworth talked of her.’

‘As she deserved, I am sure.’

‘Very warmly.’

‘He would!’

‘He told me you were the Damon and Pythias of women.’

’Her one fault is an extreme humility that makes her always play second to me; and as I am apt to gabble, I take the lead; and I am froth in comparison.  I can reverence my superiors even when tried by intimacy with them.  She is the next heavenly thing to heaven that I know.  Court her, if ever you come across her.  Or have you a man’s horror of women with brains?’

‘Am I expressing it?’ said he.

‘Do not breathe London or Paris here on me.’  She fanned the crocuses under her chin.  ’The early morning always has this—­I wish I had a word!—­touch . . . whisper . . . gleam . . . beat of wings—­I envy poets now more than ever!—­of Eden, I was going to say.  Prose can paint evening and moonlight, but poets are needed to sing the dawn.  That is because prose is equal to melancholy stuff.  Gladness requires the finer language.  Otherwise we have it coarse—­anything but a reproduction.  You politicians despise the little distinctions “twixt tweedledum and tweedledee,” I fancy.’

Of the poetic sort, Dacier’s uncle certainly did.  For himself he confessed to not having thought much on them.

‘But how divine is utterance!’ she said.  ’As we to the brutes, poets are to us.’

He listened somewhat with the head of the hanged.  A beautiful woman choosing to rhapsodize has her way, and is not subjected to the critical commentary within us.  He wondered whether she had discoursed in such a fashion to his uncle.

‘I can read good poetry,’ said he.

’If you would have this valley—­or mountain-cleft, one should call it—­described, only verse could do it for you,’ Diana pursued, and stopped, glanced at his face, and smiled.  She had spied the end of a towel peeping out of one of his pockets.  ’You came out for a bath!  Go back, by all means, and mount that rise of grass where you first saw me; and down on the other side, a little to the right, you will find the very place for a bath, at a corner of the rock—­a natural fountain; a bubbling pool in a ring of brushwood, with falling water, so tempting that I could have pardoned a push:  about five feet deep.  Lose no time.’

He begged to assure her that he would rather stroll with her:  it had been only a notion of bathing by chance when he pocketed the towel.

‘Dear me,’ she cried, ’if I had been a man I should have scurried off at a signal of release, quick as a hare I once woke up in a field with my foot on its back.’