Suddenly he began to speak. He recited the
honeyed words with which Walter Pater expressed his admiration for that
consummate picture.
'Hers is the head upon which all the ends of the world are come, and the
eyelids are a little weary. It is a beauty wrought out from within upon
the flesh, the deposit, little cell by cell, of strange thoughts and
fantastic reveries and exquisite passions. Set it for a moment beside one
of those white Greek goddesses or beautiful women of antiquity, and how
would they be troubled by this beauty, into which the soul with all its
maladies has passed. All the thoughts and experience of the world have
etched and moulded there, in that which they have of power to refine and
make expressive the outward form, the animalism of Greece, the lust of
Rome, the mysticism of the Middle Ages, with its spiritual ambition and
imaginative loves, the return of the Pagan world, the sins of the
Borgias.'
His voice, poignant and musical, blended with the suave music of the
words so that Margaret felt she had never before known their divine
significance.
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