The Quest of the Golden Girl | Page 9

"bad angels," is there really
any greater mystery than the process by which beef is turned into brains,
and beer into beauty? Every beautiful woman we see has been made
out of beefsteaks. It is a solemn thought,--and the finest poem that was
ever written came out of a grey pulpy mass such as we make brain
sauce of.
And with these grave thoughts for grace let us sit down to dinner.
Dinner!
CHAPTER VIII
STILL PRANDIAL
What wine shall we have? I confess I am no judge of wines, except
when they are bad. To-night I feel inclined to allow my choice to be
directed by sentiment; and as we are on so pretty a pilgrimage, would it
not be appropriate to drink Liebfraumilch?
Hock is full of fancy, and all wines are by their very nature full of
reminiscence, the golden tears and red blood of summers that are gone.
Forgive me, therefore, if I grow reminiscent. Indeed, I fear that the hour
for the story of my First Love has come. But first, notice the waitress. I
confess, whether beautiful or plain,--not too plain,--women who earn
their own living have a peculiar attraction for me.
I hope the Golden Girl will not turn out to be a duchess. As old
Campion sings,--
"I care not for those ladies Who must be wooed and prayed; Give me
kind Amaryllis, The wanton country-maid."
Town-maids too of the same pattern. Whether in town or country, give
me the girls that work. The Girls That Work! But evidently it is high
time woe began a new chapter.

CHAPTER IX
THE LEGEND OF HEBE, OR THE HEAVENLY HOUSEMAID
Yes, I blush to admit it, my First Love was a housemaid. So was she
known on this dull earth of ours, but in heaven--in the heaven of my
imagination, at all events--she was, of course, a goddess. How she
managed to keep her disguise I never could understand. To me she was
so obviously dea certe. The nimbus was so apparent. Yet no one
seemed to see it but me. I have heard her scolded as though she were
any ordinary earthly housemaid, and I have seen the butcher's boy
trying to flirt with her without a touch of reverence.
Maybe I understood because I saw her in that early hour of the morning
when even the stony Memnon sings, in that mystical light of the young
day when divine exiled things, condemned to rough bondage through
the noon, are for a short magical hour their own celestial selves, their
unearthly glory as yet unhidden by any earthly disguise.
Neither fairies nor fauns, dryads nor nymphs of the forest pools, have
really passed away from the world. You have only to get up early
enough to meet them in the meadows. They rarely venture abroad after
six. All day long they hide in uncouth enchanted forms. They change
maybe to a field of turnips, and I have seen a farmer priding himself on
a flock of sheep that I knew were really a most merry company of
dryads and fauns in disguise. I had but to make the sign of the cross,
sprinkle some holy water upon them, and call them by their sweet
secret names, and the whole rout had been off to the woods, with mad
gambol and song, before the eyes of the astonished farmer.
It was so with Hebe. She was really a little gold-haired blue-eyed dryad,
whose true home was a wild white cherry-tree that grew in some
scattered woodland behind the old country-house of my boyhood. In
spring- time how that naughty tree used to flash its silver nakedness of
blossom for miles across the furze and scattered birches!
I might have known it was Hebe.

Alas! it no longer bares its bosom with so dazzling a prodigality, for it
is many a day since it was uprooted. The little dryad long since fled
away weeping,--fled away, said evil tongues, fled away to the town.
Well do I remember our last meeting. Returning home one evening, I
met her at the lodge-gate hurrying away. Our loves had been
discovered, and my mother had shuddered to think that so pagan a
thing had lived so long in a Christian house. I vowed--ah! what did I
not vow?--and then we stole sadly together to comfort our aching hearts
under cover of the woodland. For the last time the wild cherry-tree
bloomed,--wonderful blossom, glittering with tears, and gloriously
radiant with stormy lights of wild passion and wilder hopes.
My faith lived valiantly till the next spring. It was Hebe who was
faithless. The cherry-tree was dead, for its dryad had gone,--fled, said
evil tongues, fled away to the town!
But as yet, in the time to which my thoughts return, our sweet