“Yet I concede,” said Gerald, “that, howsoever firm my churchmanship, and even with a princess waiting for me, I am tempted. For yonder flute-player who still delays to join her companions—who are now, no doubt, already about their merry games with one another and with their trained pets,—has charms. Yes, she has charms which give my thoughts, as it were, a locally religious turn, and make the notion of joining her a rather beautiful idea. I deplore, of course, her feathered legs. Even so, she displays, as you too may observe, in her so leisurely retreat, an opulence in that most engaging kind of beauty which once got for Aphrodite the epithet of Callipygê. I contemplate, with at least locally pious joy, the curving of those reins, the whiteness and the fineness of the skin, and the graciousness of those superb contours, designed without any stinting or exaggeration, into the perfection of those fair twin moons of delight—”

But in a moment Gerald said, “Still, there is something vaguely familiar, a something which chills me—”

And Gerald said also: “Or, rather, in their so gentle undulations as she walks unhurriedly away from us, in their so amiable convulsions,—in their heavings, their twitchings, their ripplings and their twinklings,—rather, do the bewitching and multitudinous movements of those silvery spheres resemble, to my half dazzled eyes, the unarithmeticable smiling of the sunlit sea, to which, as you will remember, Horvendile, old Æschylos has so finely referred. I feel that I could compose a not discreditable sonnet to that most beautiful of backsides. There is nothing more poetical than is the backside of a naked woman who is walking away from you. Its movements awaken the yearnings of all elegiac verse.... And I do not doubt, sir, that the front of this feathery-legged lady is fully as enchanting as the rear. Yes, I imagine that the façade too has its own peculiar attractions: and I admit, in a word, that I am tempted to confront her—”

Horvendile glanced toward the woman who alone remained within reach. “That is Evadne, who in the days of her sea-faring was called Leucosia. And it is plain enough that she waits for temptation to inflame and to uplift you into raptures somewhat more practical than all this talking.”

“She waits,” said Gerald, “in vain. At this distance she is a rather beautiful idea: nearer, she would be only another woman with her clothes off. Moreover, sir, I am a self-respecting member of the Protestant Episcopal church: and besides that, as I now perceive, it is of Evelyn Townsend’s figure that this woman’s half-seen figure reminds me. That resemblance 

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