"Then Silvia and I should be lovers now?"
"If you had loved her really, I think you would be loving her still, faults and all."
"Faults?" he repeats. "You don't understand. What if I give you the key to the puzzle? What if I tell you why Silvia's beauty moves me no jot? Why it is as impossible to me to have any love for her as to breathe life into dry-as-dust bones? Shall I tell you a story? You may suppose it to be my own, or that of any one else, just as you please."
We have come to a gnarled old garden seat, that is set where the eye can view the garden and woods, and a glimpse of the sea below, and we sit down.
"Once," he says, leaning towards me and watching my face, "a man wandered over the world, searching in cultured gardens and wayside roads, at the gates of palaces and the doors of the poor, for a certain spotless, delicate flower. He saw many very like the particular blossom he was seeking, but there always some trifling flaw, or speck, or stain, and he passed them all by, for he said to himself, 'I know that this flower exists, for other men have found it, and why should not I?' And at last to him also came the happy hour, and he found it. Long and carefully he watched it, lest after all it should be no more perfect and faultless than the rest; but at last he put out his hand, and with a great rejoicing in his heart plucked it. It was but freshly in his hand, he had scarcely tasted of its sweetness, hardly felt his soul filled with its exceeding beauty, its petals had not withered with neglect or been scorched by the hot breath of passion, when a chance blow struck it, and lo! the dazzling whiteness fell from it like a veil, and there it lay, robbed of its deceitful mantle, lovely still, but speckled, tainted, soiled. No one but God knows what that man felt then. He had sought for it so long, exulted in it so deeply; he could have laid his life on its perfect purity and soillessness, and now,
