“But Lewis! I meant—I’m afraid I meant—that Petra Farwell, young girl though she is, has several times made me remember the Maid of the Alder. I haven’t just made it up now. Truly. I thought of it the last time I was at Green Doors. We were there for dinner....”
“Petra—the Maid of the Alder! You’re a little mad! But it’s rather a curious coincidence that I myself have been brooding on ‘Phantastes’ very lately, this afternoon, in fact, at Green Doors and apropos of Petra too. Fact! Do you remember Anodos’ song to his ideal woman—the genuine one, not the imitation—through her shrouding marble? It says how the world’s sculptors in their search for her have succeeded in embodying in their creations no more than their ideas of what she may be. They’ve never taken hold of her living self. I even remember some lines. Bless me if I don’t!
“Round their visions, form enduring,
Marble vestments thou hast thrown;
But thyself, in silence winding,
Thou has kept eternally;
Thee they found not, many finding—
I have found thee: wake for me.”
Lewis murmuring poetry in the dusk! And with the little curly smile that with him, paradoxically, meant utterest sincerity in what he was saying, even solemnity! Cynthia’s heart beat slowly and with a kind of awe at the simplicity of the way in which Lewis’ curly smile and his poetry had shut her up, permanently, on the subject of Petra. The whole situation—trivial and really nothing at all to Cynthia until only a minute ago—had between a breath and a breath been lifted to the dignity of a position on the knees of the gods, where she must perforce leave it to its own developments in that realm of pure fatality. And she thought they had been talking lightly!
But now her brother was asking—casual again, thank goodness—“Have the kids gone up to bed yet? I’m terribly afraid I promised ’em a yarn after they were packed away and that model starched nurse you indict on ’em was well out of the picture. They’ll be looking for me.”