"A woman's eyes," a long-haired young man at his elbow was declaring to a group of listening women, "a woman's eyes are the index of her soul."
An elderly lady in mauve caught him up.
"But our souls, you see, are like the magazines—they mostly come uncut. And that's why only the paper-knife of matrimony really finds us out."
Hartley looked at the group, crestfallen, disappointed, vaguely disgusted. Their brilliance seemed to him the brilliance of tinsel and paper roses. And he asked himself in sudden indeterminate terror if this was the sort of thing he was to waste his days over.
CHAPTER IX
THE TWILIGHT OF THE GODDESS
She from her rose-grown turrets came
And laughed up in his eyes;
He flushed to his pale brow with shame,
And spake unto the skies:
"To Christ this woman yet shall bow,
Or be cast down," he said,
"And where she flaunts her scarlet now
Shall float the Cross instead."
John Hartley, "The Broken Knight."