With a sharp cry she sprang to her feet and fled, impelled by passionate, reasonless instinct to hide herself forever and forever from the only eyes she loved.
Before her were the maze of the poppy-fields. In the moonlight their blossoms, so gorgeous at sunset or at noon, lost all their scarlet gaud and purple pomp, and drooped like discrowned kings stripped bare in the midnight of calamity.
Their colorless flowers writhed and twined about her ankles. Her brown limbs glistened in the gleam from the skies. She tightened her red girdle round her loins and ran, as a doe runs to reach the sanctuary.
Long withes of trailing grasses, weeds that grew among the grasses, caught her fleet feet and stopped her. The earth was wet with dew. A tangle of boughs and brambles filled the path. For once, her sure steps failed her. She faltered and fell.
Ere he could touch her, she rose again. The scent of the wet leaves was in her hair. The rain-drops glistened on her feet. The light of the stars seemed in her burning eyes. Around her were the gleam of the night, the scent of the flowers, the smell of woods. On her face the moon shone.
She was like a creature born from the freshness of dews, from the odor of foliage, from the hues of the clouds, from the foam of the brooks, from all things of the woods and the water. In that moment she was beautiful with the beauty of women.
"If only she could content me!" he thought. If only he had cared for the song of the reed by the river!
But he cared nothing at all for anything that lived; and a pursuit that was passionless had always seemed to him base; and his feet were set on a stony and narrow road where he would not incumber his strength with a thing of her sex, lest the burden should draw him backward one rood on his way.
He had never loved her; he never would love her; his senses were awake to her beauty, indeed, and his reason awed it beyond all usual gifts of her sex. But he had used it in the service of his art, and therein had scrutinized, and portrayed, and debased until it had lost to him all that fanciful sanctity, all that half-mysterious charm, which arouse the passion of love in a man to a woman.
So he let her be, and stood by her in the dusk of the night with no light in his own eyes.