I knew, of course, what was the matter with me; the symptoms were unmistakable.  After having made up my mind that I was an old woman, and that there was nothing more in life for me save labour—­here the little archer had come, and with the sharpest of his golden arrows, had shot me through.  I had all the thrills, the raptures and delicious agonies of first love; I lived no longer in myself, but in the thought of another person.  Twenty times a day I looked at my picture, and cried aloud:  “Oh, beautiful, beautiful!”

I do not know how much of her I have been able to give.  I have told of our first talk—­but words are so cold and dead!  I stop and ask:  What there is, in all nature, that has given me the same feeling?  I remember how I watched the dragon-fly emerging from its chrysalis.  It is soft and green and tender; it clings to a branch and dries its wings in the sun, and when the miracle is completed, there for a brief space it poises, shimmering with a thousand hues, quivering with its new-born ecstasy.  And just so was Sylvia; a creature from some other world than ours, as yet unsoiled by the dust and heat of reality.  It came to me with a positive shock, as a terrifying thing, that there should be in this world of strife and wickedness any young thing that took life with such intensity, that was so palpitating with eagerness, with hope, with sympathy.  Such was the impression that one got of her, even when her words most denied it.  She might be saying world-weary and cynical things, out of the maxims of Lady Dee; but there was still the eagerness, the sympathy, surging beneath and lifting her words.

The crown of her loveliness was her unconsciousness of self.  Even though she might be talking of herself, frankly admitting her beauty, she was really thinking of other people, how she could get to them to help them.  This I must emphasize, because, apart from jesting, I would not have it thought that I had fallen under the spell of a beautiful countenance, combined with a motor-car and a patrician name.  There were things about Sylvia that were aristocratic, that could be nothing else; but she could be her same lovely self in a cottage—­as I shall prove to you before I finish with the story of her life.

I was in love.  At that time I was teaching myself German, and I sat one day puzzling out two lines of Goethe: 

“Oden and Thor, these two thou knowest; Freya, the heavenly, knowest thou not.”

And I remember how I cried aloud in sudden delight:  "I know her!" For a long time that was one of my pet names—­“Freya dis Himmlische!” I only heard of one other that I preferred—­when in course of time she told me about Frank Shirley, and how she had loved him, and how their hopes had been wrecked.  He had called her “Lady Sunshine”; he had been wont to call it over and over in his happiness, and as Sylvia repeated it to me—­“Lady Sunshine!  Lady Sunshine!” I could imagine that I caught an echo of the very tones of Frank Shirley’s voice.