shiny white powder that was so popular in the circles he had lately been frequenting.
His love, if he could call it by that name,—and it was not at all the sort of thing one might have expected it to be,—blinded and paralyzed him. It pursued its dynamic course despite the most cogent obstacles one could raise in its path. Love makes fools sublime, he reflected, but by the same token reduces the intelligent to a state of imbecility.
The feature of the experience that made it most difficult to manage was the fact that love wove a magic cloak about the object of one's desires, lending it a strange and irresistible beauty. And whoever had said that a thing of beauty was a joy forever was an idiot, thought Grover,—unless by "joy" he meant excruciatingly pleasant apprehension of the object. It is tragic as well as grotesque, he reflected, that the thing which, once a year or so, reveals you to yourself in all your defenceless nudity is the tilt of some little nobody's nose. Being in love didn't at all blind him to the fact that Olga was a little nobody, for his mind and his heart were as independent of each other as ever. It simply blinded him to what was practical and feasible; on the other hand it gave extraordinary acuity to his imaginative sight: rendered it possible for him to see himself with dazzling distinctness on a faraway island with a glorified sister of Léon Vaudreuil forever at his side—or even nearer.
The tilt of a nose, his thoughts roamed on, not only
