Vance listened enthralled. Her rich voice, modelling the words, gave them a new relief. He was half aware that her way of speaking was unlike any he had ever heard, but too much under the spell of what she was saying to separate it from the quality of her utterance. He commanded imperiously: "Go on—" and she continued, leaning slightly toward him and dropping the petal-like syllables with soft deliberation:

"'A damsel with a dulcimer

In a vision once I saw … '"

Vance leaned back and listened with deep-drawn breath and lowered lids. "Honey-dew … honey-dew … " he murmured as she ended, half consciously applying the epithet to her voice.

She dropped down into a chair beside him and looked at him thoughtfully. "It's queer—your caring as much as that about poetry, and never having come across this."

He flushed up, and for the first time looked at her with full awareness of her presence as a stranger, and an intruder on his dream. The look confirmed him in the impression that she was very young, though probably two or three years older than himself. But it might be only her tallness and self-assurance which made him think her older. She had dark gray eyes, deeply lashed, and features somewhat too long and thin in repose, but rounded and illumined by a smile which flashed across her face in sudden sympathy or amusement. Vance detected amusement now, and answered curtly: "I daresay if you knew me you'd think there was a whole lot of things I'd never come across."

"I daresay," she agreed complaisantly. "But I might also remember that you were probably too young even to have heard of 'The Ancient Mariner.'"

"Coleridge? The 'Ancient Mariner' one? Was it the same who wrote this?"

She nodded. "You know 'The Ancient Mariner,' then? Sixth Reader, I suppose—or college course?" She laughed a little. "So culture comes."

He interrupted angrily: "What have I said to make you laugh?"

"Nothing. I wasn't laughing at you, but at the intelligence of our national educators—no, educationists, I think they call themselves nowadays—who manage to take the bloom off our greatest treasures by giving them to young savages to maul. I see, for instance, that they've spoilt 'The Ancient Mariner' for you." She continued to scrutinize him thoughtfully. "You're not one of the young savages—but the bloom has been rubbed off a good many things for you in that way, hasn't it?"

"Well, yes—some."

"Not that it matters—for you. You'll get it back. But I do so hate to think of mutilated beauty."

Mutilated beauty! How rich the words sounded on her lips—as if she swept the rubbish of the centuries from some broken statue, noble in its ruin! Vance continued to look at her, absently yet intently. He had drawn her into his dream.