pony's flank. They were off like the wind. It is an old
saying in the West that newcomers always ride a horse or two
to death before they get broken in to the country. They are
tempted by the great open spaces and try to outride the horizon, to
get to the end of something. Margaret galloped over the level
road, and Eric, from behind, saw her long veil fluttering in the
wind. It had fluttered just so in his dreams last night and the
night before. With a sudden inspiration of courage he overtook her
and rode beside her, looking intently at her half-averted face.
Before, he had only stolen occasional glances at it, seen it in
blinding flashes, always with more or less embarrassment, but now
he determined to let every line of it sink into his memory. Men of
the world would have said that it was an unusual face, nervous,
finely cut, with clear, elegant lines that betokened ancestry. Men
of letters would have called it a historic face, and would have
conjectured at what old passions, long asleep, what old sorrows
forgotten time out of mind, doing battle together in ages gone, had
curved those delicate nostrils, left their unconscious memory in
those eyes. But Eric read no meaning in these details. To him
this beauty was something more than colour and line; it was a flash
of white light, in which one cannot distinguish colour because all
colours are there. To him it was a complete revelation, an
embodiment of those dreams of impossible loveliness that linger by
a young man's pillow on midsummer nights; yet, because it held
something more than the attraction of health and youth and
shapeliness, it troubled him, and in its presence he felt as the
Goths before the white marbles in the Roman Capitol, not knowing
whether they were men or gods. At times he felt like uncovering
his head before it, again the fury seized him to break and despoil,
to find the clay in this spirit-thing and stamp upon it. Away from