“The enchantments were as thick as shadows under the trees: perhaps the loveliest of women riding a snow-white mule, with a saddle cloth of red samite, or, wrapped in her shining hair, on a leopard with yellow eyes, lured you to a pavilion, scattered with rushes and flowers and magical herbs, and a shameful end. Or a silver doe would weep, begging you to pierce her with your sword, and, when you did, there knelt the daughter of the King of Wales.
“But I started to tell you about the worship of beauty. Plato started it although Cardinal Pietro Bembo was responsible for the creed. He lived in Italy, in an age like a lily. It developed mostly at Florence in the Platonic Academy of Cosomo and Pico della Mirandola. Love was the supreme force, and its greatest expression a desire beyond the body.”
He gazed at Linda with a quizzical light in his eyes deep in shadow.
“Love,” he said again, and then paused. “One set of words will do as well as another. You will understand, or not, with something far different from intellectual comprehension. The endless service of beauty. Of course, a woman—but never the animal; the spirit always. Born in the spirit, served in the spirit, ending in the spirit. A direct contradiction, you see, to nature and common sense, frugality and the sacred symbol of the dollar.
“It wouldn't please your Mr. Jasper, with his heaps and heaps of money. Mr. Jasper would consider himself sold. But Novalis, not so very long ago, understood.... A dead girl more real than all earth. You mustn't suppose it to be mere mysticism.”
Linda said, “Very well, I won't.”
He nodded. “No one could call Michelangelo hysterical. Sometime in the history of man, of a salt solution, this divinity has touched them. Touched them hopefully, and perhaps gone—banished by the other destination. Or I can comprehend nature killing it relentlessly, since it didn't lead to propagation. Then, too, as much as was useful was turned into a dogma for politics and priests.
“You saw in the rushlight a woman against the arras; there was a humming of viola d'amore from the musicians' balcony; she smiled at you, lingering, and then vanished with a whisper of brocade de Lyons on a sanded floor. Nothing else but a soft white glove, eternally fragrant, in your habergeon, an eternally fragrant memory; the dim vision in stone street and coppice; a word, a message, it might be, sent across the world of steel at death. And then, in the last flicker of vision, the arras and the clear insistent strings, the whispering brocade de Lyons on the landing.
“The philosophy of it,” he said in a different tone, “is exact, even a scientific truth. But men have been more concerned with turning lead into gold; naturally the spirit has been neglected. The science of love has been incredibly soiled:
“The old gesture toward the stars, the bridge of perfection, the escape from the fatality of flesh. Yet it was a service of the body made incredibly lovely in actuality and still never to be grasped. Never to be won. It ought to be clear to you that realized it would diminish into quite a different thing—