Life sometimes builds an enigma out of common clay, and with a look from a twelve-year-old girl, sets a Dante singing. It can make a god of a bull, a divinity of an ibis, or a beetle, set up a golden calf to be worshipped of the multitude. Paradox! Paradox! In this case an immature and yet nearly perfect body held a seemingly poetic and yet utterly nebulous appreciation of life—a body so youthful, a soul so fumbling that one would ask, How should tragedy lurk in form like this?
A fool?
Not quite, yet so nebulous, so much a dreamer that difficulty might readily follow in the wake of any thoughtless deed.
As a matter of fact, favored as she was by nature and fortune, her very presence was dangerous—provocative, without thought of being so. If a true artist had painted her, synthesizing her spirit with her body, he might have done so showing her standing erect on a mountain top, her limbs outlined amidst fluttering draperies against the wind, her eyes fixed on distant heights, or a falling star. Out of mystery into mystery again, so she came and went. Her mind was not unlike a cloud of mist through which the morning sun is endeavoring to break, irradiating all with its flushes of pink and gold. Again it was like those impearled shells of the South Sea, without design yet suggestive of all perfections and all beauties. Dreams! dreams!—of clouds, sunsets, colors, sounds which a too articulate world would do its best later to corrupt. What Dante saw in Beatrice, what Abélard saw in Héloïse, Romeo in Juliet, so some wondering swain could have seen in her—and suffered a like fate.
Eugene encountered Mrs. Dale at a house party on Long Island one Saturday afternoon, and their friendship began at once. She was introduced to him by Colfax, and because of the latter's brusque, jesting spirit was under no illusions as to his social state.
"You needn't look at him closely," he observed gaily, "he's married."
"That simply makes him all the more interesting," she rippled, and extended her hand.
Eugene took it. "I'm glad a poor married man can find shelter somewhere," he said, smartly.
"You should rejoice," she replied. "It's at once your liberty and your protection. Think how safe you are!"
"I know, I know," he said. "All the slings and arrows of Miss Fortune hurtling by."