That spring-time in Sicily seemed to Hermione touched with a glamour such
as the imaginative dreamer connects with an earlier world--a world that
never existed save in the souls of dreamers, who weave tissues of gold to
hide naked realities, and call down the stars to sparkle upon the
dust-heaps of the actual. Hermione at first tried to make her husband see
it with her eyes, live in it with her mind, enjoy it, or at least seem to
enjoy it, with her heart. Did he not love her? But he did more; he looked
up to her with reverence. In her love for him there was a yearning of
worship, such as one gifted with the sense of the ideal is conscious of
when he stands before one of the masterpieces of art, a perfect bronze or
a supreme creation in marble. Something of what Hermione had felt in past
years when she looked at "The Listening Mercury," or at the statue of a
youth from Hadrian's Villa in the Capitoline Museum at Rome, she felt
when she looked at Maurice, but the breath of life in him increased,
instead of diminishing, her passion of admiration. And this sometimes
surprised her. For she had thought till now that the dead sculptors of
Greece and Rome had in their works succeeded in transcending humanity,
had shown what God might have created instead of what He had created, and
had never expected, scarcely ever even desired, to be moved by a living
being as she was moved by certain representations of life in a material.
Yet now she was so moved. There seemed to her in her husband's beauty
something strange, something ideal, almost an other-worldliness, as if
he had been before this age in which she loved him, had had an existence
in the fabled world that the modern pagan loves to recall when he walks
in a land where legend trembles in the flowers, and whispers in the
trees, and is carried on the winds across the hill-sides, and lives again
in the silver of the moon. Often she thought of him listening in a green
glade to the piping of Pan, or feeding his flocks on Mount Latmos, like
Endymion, and falling asleep to receive the kisses of Selene. Or she
imagined him visiting Psyche in the hours of darkness, and fleeing,
light-footed, before the coming of the dawn. He seemed to her ardent
spirit to have stepped into her life from some Attic frieze out of a
"fairy legend of old Greece," and the contact of daily companionship did
not destroy in her the curious, almost mystical sensation roused in her
by the peculiar, and essentially youthful charm which even Artois had
been struck by in a London restaurant.