He interrupted her:  “Lys, dear friend, you must not bore Miss Adams with my theories of art and life. She has read me—­”

Ermentrude gave him a grateful glance.  He seemed, despite his self-consciousness, a great man—­how great she could not exactly define.  His eyes—­two black diamonds full of golden reflections, the eyes of a conqueror, a seer—­began to burn little bright spots into her consciousness, and, selfishly, she admitted, she wished the two women would go away and leave her to interrogate her idol in peace.  There were so many things to ask him, so many difficult passages in The Golden Glaze and Hesitations, above all in that great dramatic poem, The Voices, which she had witnessed in Paris, with its mystic atmosphere of pity and terror.  She would never forget her complex feelings, when at a Paris theatre, she saw slowly file before her in a Dream-Masque the wraith-like figures of the poet, their voices their only corporeal gift.  Picture had dissolved into picture, and in the vapours of these crooning enchantments she heard voices of various timbres enunciating in monosyllables the wisdom of the ages, the poetry of the future.  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.  For the first time in her life Ermentrude Adams, delicately nurtured in a social hothouse, realized in wrath the major tyranny of caste.

The evening wore away.  Mrs. Sheldam aroused her husband as she cast a horrified glance at the classic prints he had been studying.  The princess dismissed her two impressionists and came over to the poet.  She, too plainly, did not care for his wife, and as the party broke up there was a sense of relief, though Ermentrude could not conceal her dissatisfaction.  Her joy was sincere when Madame Keroulan asked Miss Adams and her aunt to call.  It was slightly gelid, the invitation, though accepted immediately by Ermentrude.  The convenances could look out for themselves; she would not go back to America without an interview.  The princess raised her hand mockingly.