sageway lift a woman from the shadow and raise her against the mad stars, smothering her squeal against his tall kiss.) Then voices and sounds, shadows and echoes change form swirling, becoming the headless, armless, legless torso of a girl, motionless and virginal and passionately eternal before the shadows and echoes whirl away.
(They went on. The Semitic man nursed the bottle against his breast.) I love three things. . . . Dante invented Beatrice, creating himself a maid that life had not had time to create, and laid upon her frail and unbowed shoulders the whole burden of man’s history of his impossible heart’s desire. . . . At last one priest, becoming bolder, leans yet nearer and slips his hand beneath the beggar’s sorry robe, against his heart. It is cold. (Suddenly Fairchild stumbled heavily beside him and would have fallen. He held Fairchild up and supported him to the wall, and Fairchild leaned against the wall, his head tilted back, hatless, staring into the sky, listening to the dark and measured beating of the heart of things. “That’s what it is. Genius.” He spoke slowly, distinctly, staring into the sky. “People confuse it so, you see. They have got it now to where it signifies only an active state of the mind in which a picture is painted or a poem is written. When it is not that at all. It is that Passion Week of the heart, that instant of timeless beatitude which some never know, which some, I suppose, gain at will, which others gain through an outside agency like alcohol, like to-night—that passive state of the heart with which the mind, the brain, has nothing to do at all, in which the hackneyed accidents which make up this world—love and life and death and sex and sorrow—brought together by chance in perfect proportions, take on a kind of splendid and timeless beauty. Like Yseult of the White Hands and her Tristan with that clean, highhearted dullness
