XI
THE FIRST BATTLE, AND DEFEAT
From Camelot to Cameliard
The way by bright pavilions starred,
In arms and armor all unmarred,
To Guinevere rode Lancelot to claim for Arthur
his reward.
Down from her window look't the maid
To see her bridegroom, half afraid—
In him saw kingliness arrayed:
And summoned by the herald Love to yield, her woman's
heart obeyed.
From Cameliard to Camelot
Rode Guinevere and Lancelot—
Ye bright pavilions, babble not!
The king she took, she keeps for king, in spite of
shame, in spite of blot!
—From Cameliard to Camelot.
It is a disagreeable duty (one, however, which you and I, madam, discharge with a conscientiousness which the unthinking are sometimes unable to distinguish from zeal) to criticize one's friends. The task is doubly hard when the animadversion is committed to paper, with a more or less definite idea of ultimate publication. I trust, beloved, that we may call Mr. Florian Amidon a friend. He is an honest fellow as the world goes, in spite of the testimony of Simeon Woolaver regarding the steers; and he wishes to do the right thing. In a matter of business, now, or on any question of films, plates or lenses, we should find him full of decision, just and prompt in action. But (and the disagreeable duty of censure comes in here) there he stands like a Stoughton-bottle in a most abject state of woe, because, forsooth, he possesses the love of that budding Juno over there by the grate, and knows not what to do with it! What if he doesn't feel as if he had the slightest personal acquaintance with her? What if the image of another, and the thought——? But look with me, for a moment, at the situation.
There she sits, so attentive to her book (is it the Rubaiyat? Yes!) that his entrance has not attracted her notice—not at all! One shapely patent-leather is stretched out to the fender, and the creamy silk of the gown happens to be drawn back so as to show the slender ankle, and a glimpse of black above the leather. The desire for exactness alone compels a reference to the fact that the boundary lines of this silhouetted black area diverge perceptibly as they recede from the shoe. It is only a detail, but even Florian notices it, and thinks about it afterward. Her face is turned toward the shadows up there by the window, her eyes looking at space, as if in quest of Iram and his Rose, or Jamshyd and his Sev'n-ring'd Cup, or the solution of the Master-knot of Human Fate. The unconscious pose showing the incurved spine, and the arms and shoulders glimpsing through falls of lace at sleeve and corsage, would make the fortune of the photographer-in-ordinary to a professional beauty. And yet that man Amidon stands there like a graven image, and fears to rush in where an angel has folded her wings for him and rests!
