Chapter 12 - Page 2

superficial critics wonder without relief how they ever
succeeded in dragging a bride to the altar. He never alluded to
Flora Saunt; and there was in his silence about her, quite as in
Mrs. Meldrum's, an element of instinctive tact, a brief implication
that if you didn't happen to have been in love with her there was
nothing to be said.

Within a week after my return to London I went to the opera, of
which I had always been much of a devotee. I arrived too late for
the first act of "Lohengrin," but the second was just beginning,
and I gave myself up to it with no more than a glance at the house.
When it was over I treated myself, with my glass, from my place in
the stalls, to a general survey of the boxes, making doubtless on
their contents the reflections, pointed by comparison, that are
most familiar to the wanderer restored to London. There was the
common sprinkling of pretty women, but I suddenly noted that one of
these was far prettier than the others. This lady, alone in one of
the smaller receptacles of the grand tier and already the aim of
fifty tentative glasses, which she sustained with admirable
serenity, this single exquisite figure, placed in the quarter
furthest removed from my stall, was a person, I immediately felt,
to cause one's curiosity to linger. Dressed in white, with
diamonds in her hair and pearls on her neck, she had a pale
radiance of beauty which even at that distance made her a
distinguished presence and, with the air that easily attaches to
lonely loveliness in public places, an agreeable mystery. A
mystery however she remained to me only for a minute after I had
levelled my glass at her: I feel to this moment the startled
thrill, the shock almost of joy, with which I translated her vague
brightness into a resurrection of Flora. I say a resurrection,
because, to put it crudely, I had on that last occasion left our
young woman for dead. At present perfectly alive again, she was
altered only, as it were, by this fact of life. A little older, a
little quieter, a little finer and a good deal fairer, she was
simply transfigured by having recovered. Sustained by the
reflection that even her recovery wouldn't enable her to
distinguish me in the crowd, I was free to look at her well. Then
it was it came home to me that my vision of her in her great
goggles had been cruelly final. As her beauty was all there was of
her, that machinery had extinguished her, and so far as I had
thought of her in the interval I had thought of her as buried in
the tomb her stern specialist had built. With the sense that she
had escaped from it came a lively wish to return to her; and if I
didn't straightway leave my place and rush round the theatre and up
to her box it was because I was fixed