“Yes, I was,” she said, “but that’s just what I want to show you. That’s over, but one isn’t all heart, any more than I hope and believe one is all face. One has a mind, and a soul, and possibilities. I won’t go to the bottom, if I was shipwrecked once. Nothing can ever take up the whole of one, I suppose. I thought it could then. Now if I don’t get ready quick, I shall be late.”
She ran away as she spoke. It was not her way to neglect the necessity of the moment, and she made such good speed, that she was in the drawing-room before any of the guests arrived. On the table lay a thin square book bound in bluish-green, with a silver iris in the corner.
“Sylvester Riddell’s poem, my dear,” said Lady Haredale. “I bought it when I was out with the children. He’ll like to see it on the table. Look at it, then you can talk to him about it.”
Amethyst took it up, and glanced over the pages. She was a rapid reader, and in a very few minutes, she caught the idea of the poem, the passionate search for an ideal, and it attracted her. Did it contradict the philosophy which she had been preaching to Una, or was it in truth its justification? The look of interest was still on her face, the book in her hand, when its author was announced, and, when she put it down and greeted him with a delightful smile, as of one caught in the act, Sylvester felt that all the reviews in London might cut ‘Iris’ to pieces. She had had her day.
He sat by Amethyst at dinner, and neither prince nor millionaire was there to claim her attention. She appeared neither cold nor resentful, and that she was somewhat excited, he did not guess. Her lovely eyes, with their mysterious depths, were turned upon him, and she referred to his poem with a certain modest deference, as if in explaining it, he did her an honour. Sylvester had never known before, how utterly he had failed to express his hero’s rapture, when Iris shone upon him with no cloud between.
“It is no new subject,” he said, modestly, “but the idea possessed me—”
“It seems new, I think,” said Amethyst, who, at twenty, had not quite exhausted all the ideas of life. “It is very interesting, but, practically, when Iris was so unattainable, don’t you think he would have managed to get on without her—by the help of his music—and his battles?”
“You see,” said Sylvester, eagerly and nervously, “in a measure he found her in art, and in the struggle of life, and, in so far as she was embodied in them, she gave them value.”
“I am not sure that I understand,” said Amethyst, in soft considerate tones. “What is it that you intend Iris to signify?”
“She was his dream of perfection,” said Sylvester, very low, “his vision—well, his Beatrice. He found something of perfect beauty in many things—when he sought it with sufficient pains, but—but love, of course, was the higher revelation. He could be content with nothing less.”