The Story
of Saville
A heavenly halo above a face—Nay hush! for I dare not paint
That face with its birthmark fatal and foul, its hideous carrion-taint!
But Saville had confronted it all her life, and to-day with a ghastly mirth
She twisted her lips to a livid smile, “’Tis well that she died at my birth,
My mother,” she mused, “for to-day her life she would deem but of slenderest worth!”
And she lay and mourned how strange it was, how passing all utterance sad
That naught in the heart or mind of a woman the love of a man forbade
So utterly as a surface blemish, a faulture gossamer thin,
Sprung from a tissue freighted too deep or a hindered current within,—
For a woman may have a petrified heart, icy, and rock to the core,
Scarred by tempests and seamed and gashed, lichened and rusted o’er,
Of pity incapable, never to beat with a pulse of kindliness more,—
She may have a mind, if you call it a mind, the sluggish dull animal sense
