This
play was, for her, and for Paris, too, the last word in dramatic art,
the supreme _nuance_ of beauty. Everything had been accomplished:
Shakespeare, Moliere, Ibsen; yet here was a new evocation, a fresh peep
at untrodden paths. In bliss that almost dissolved her being, the
emotional American girl reached her hotel, where she tried to sleep.
When her aunt told her of the invitation tendered by the princess, a
rare one socially, she was in the ninth heaven of the Swedenborgians.
Any place to meet Octave Keroulan!
And now he sat near her signalling, she knew, her sympathies, and as the
fates would have it two dragons, her aunt and his wife, guarded the
gateway to the precious garden of his imagination. She could have cried
aloud her chagrin. Such an inestimable treasure was genius that to see
it under lock and key invited indignation. The time was running on, and
her great man had said nothing. He could, if he wished, give her a
million extraordinary glimpses of the earth and the air and the waters
below them, for his eyes were mirrors of his marvellous and
many-coloured soul; but what chance had he with a conjugal iceberg on
one side, a cloud of smoke--poor Aunt Sheldam--on the other! She felt in
her fine, rhapsodic way like a young priestess before the altar, ready
to touch with a live coal the lips of the gods, but withheld by a
malignant power.
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