mind; and his blood was in a fever, and his thoughts were deliriously confused. But even so, there was something spiritual in his frenzy. He thought of her as the boy of the classic fable must have thought of his goddess when she descended to him—Diana!—from her moon. After the first hungry obsession that had made him take her face in his hands, he stood back from her as from something holy. She was what the poets had made woman to him. She was something so nearly divine that she was to be almost worshipped with that passionate reverence which the poets make of love. All his religious emotions, turned back from their proper outlet by the scepticisms of Science, flowed out to her in the tide of desire. His make-believes, his day-dreams of her, had surrounded her with a sort of glory that was part of the bewitchment of her beauty. He did not even dare, in his thought, to kiss her hand.
And yet, that was not all. The process of his mind was not so high fantastical alone. With the complexity of a brain that was trained to cheat itself with its own make-believes but still was never ignorant that it was being cheated, Don was aware that his relations with her were not to be simply those of blind worship and accepted love. Her frightened confusion, when his voice had betrayed him, warned him, now, that mere ecstasy and ardour would only drive her from him; that he must be politic; that she was a human being judging him in accordance with the conventions of human society, and not as clairvoyant as a goddess or as untrammelled as an ideal.
