Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/69

1858.] of those thick white stars,—a tasted odor. Not so the cool air that came to me from a diamond-shaped bed of Parma violets, kept back so long from bloom that I might have a succession of them; these were the last, and their perfume told it, for it was at once a caress and a sigh. I breathed the gale of sweetness till every nerve rested and every pulse was tranquil as the air without.

I heard a little stir. I looked up. A stately calla, that reared one marble cup from its gracious cool leaves, was bending earthward with a slow and voluntary motion; from the cup glided a fair woman's shape; snowy, sandalled feet shone from under the long robe; hair of crisped gold crowned the Greek features. It was Hypatia. A little shiver crept through a white tea-rose beside the calla; its delicate leaves fluttered to the ground; a slight figure, a sweet, sad face, with melancholy blue eyes and fair brown hair, parted the petals. La Vallière! She gazed in my eyes.

"Poor little child!" said she. "Have you a treatise against love, Hypatia?"

The Greek of Egypt smiled and looked at me also. "I have discovered that the steps of the gods are upon wool," answered she; "if love had a beginning to sight, should not we also foresee its end?"

"And when one foresees the end, one dies," murmured La Vallière.

"Bah!" exclaimed Marguerite of Valois, from the heart of a rose-red camellia,—"not at all, my dear; one gets a new lover!"

"Or the new lover gets you," said a dulcet tone, tipped with satire, from the red lips of Mary of Scotland,—lips that were just now the petals of a crimson carnation.

"Philosophy hath a less troubled sea wherein to ride than the stormy fluctuance of mortal passion; Plato is diviner than Ovid," said a puritanic, piping voice from a coif that was fashioned out of the white camellia-blooms behind my chair, and circled the prim beauty of Lady Jane Grey.

"Are you a woman, or one of the Sphinx's children?" said a stormy, thrilling, imperious accent, from the wild purple and scarlet flower of the Strelitzia, that gradually shaped itself into gorgeous Oriental robes, rolled in waves of splendor from the lithe waist and slender arms of a dark woman, no more young,—sallow, thin, but more graceful than any bending bough of the desert acacia, and with eyes like midnight, deep, glowing, flashing, melting into dew, as she looked at the sedate lady of England.

"You do not know love!" resumed she. "It is one draught,—a jewel fused in nectar; drink the pearl and bring the asp!"

Her words brought beauty; the sallow face burnt with living scarlet on lip and cheek; the tiny pearl-grains of teeth flashed across the swarth shade above her curving, passionate mouth; the wide nostrils expanded; the great eyes flamed under her low brow and glittering coils of black hair.

"Poor Octavia!" whispered La Vallière. Lady Jane Grey took up her breviary and read.

"After all, you died!" said Hypatia.

"I lived!" retorted Cleopatra.

"Lived and loved," said a dreamy tone from the hundred leaves of a spotless La Marque rose; and the steady, "unhasting, unresting" soul of Thekla looked out from that centreless flower, in true German guise of brown braided tresses, deep blue eyes like forget-me-nots, sedate lips, and a straight nose.

"I have lived, and loved, and cut bread and butter," solemnly pronounced a mountain-daisy, assuming the broad features of a fräulein.

Cleopatra used an Egyptian oath. Lady Jane Grey put down her breviary and took up Plato. Marguerite of Valois laughed outright. Hypatia put a green leaf over Charlotte, with the air of a high-priestess, and extinguished her.

"Who does not love cannot lose," mused La Vallière.

"Who does not love neither has nor gains," said Hypatia. "The dilemma