“Oh, I am only a glow-worm, who’s apt to lose his little torch any minute, however much I may wish to be an archangel of light.”
“Angels are finished with experience; they are men who have been sublimated to cold perfection. Don’t you wish to live, to experience, for yourself?” the young man demanded with intensity. Julie felt rather unaccountably impelled to say that she did.
“I used to live in this house, myself,” he declared. “It was bachelor quarters till the Calcedos teased it back. There is a wonderful view from the balcony; I used to sit and look at it by the hour. Come, and let me show it to you.”
They strolled out to the gallery. Calmiden pointed to the causeway, a narrow strip of glistening land, looking in the moonlight like a bridge flung between two worlds, with solid silver masses of water on either side.
“What a strange roadway!” Julie said. “What is at the other end?”
“I don’t know. Nobody ever goes over there. There is a mass of legends about the causeway; one that in a great cholera plague, the angels walking about the earth, lifted it out of the water in order to go across. I imagine the volcano to the south—whose red glow you can see on clear nights, against the sky, as if the sea were on fire—had something to do with its origin. I love it—-I feel as if it were to have something to do with my fate.”
“These are such strange nights,” Julie reflected. “They are too dramatic for sleeping; the universe comes out from behind its curtain; they are nights for walking the causeway alone with one’s soul.”
The young man’s straight gaze swerved quickly to her. Julie had on a green gown, and the green bracelet, which rested on the railing of the gallery. Of all the lovely shining things of the night, the young man appeared to have decided, she was the loveliest, and the most charming.
“Do you wear that,”—he gestured toward the jade circle—“because of your eyes?”
“I wear it because somebody gave it to me.”