His thoughts were still with Arithelli, the weird witch-girl, whose
eyes were like those of Swinburne's fair woman,
"Coloured like a water-flower,
And deeper than the green sea's glass."
He, who now never opened a book, had once known that most un-English of
all poets by heart.
In her many phases Arithelli passed before him, as he stared moodily at
the shifting opal-coloured liquid in his glass. He thought of her as
he had often seen her, fighting through her work at the Hippodrome, the
little weary head always gallantly carried, and then when she had
dismounted and was in her dressing-room, the rings round her eyes, her
shaking hands and utter weariness. He remembered her consideration for
her horses, her loathing of the ill-treatment of all dumb things so
common here. Once he had found her in the market-place, remonstrating
in her broken Spanish with the country women for the inhuman manner in
which they carried away their purchases of live fowl, tied neck to
neck, and slung across a mule, to die of slow strangulation under the
blazing sun.
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